by John Langan
Life goes on. That’s the remarkable thing, isn’t it? Not that everything the Schmidts and their companions had been through with the Fisherman wasn’t incredible, but that the world could have continued as it always has, anyway, seems astonishing. Once or twice a year, usually when summer’s at its height, Italo brings his family to visit. While Clara and Lottie fuss over how big the children have grown and listen to them report their latest activities, Rainer and Italo trade remarks about the weather and whatever news the headlines have been concerned with; while Jacob listens quietly, nodding every now and again to show he’s paying attention. He’s done quite well for himself, has Italo, buying out the stonemason who hired him, bringing on his son, Giovanni, to work with him. He has more business, he says, than he knows what to do with, but he’s lucky to have such problems. Clara tells him he should find a nice woman, but Italo insists he doesn’t have time for such things. Over the course of his visits, his hair whitens and thins, his skin takes on a gray pallor that Clara declares she does not care for. Italo poo-poos her worrying, but when word comes from Wiltwyck that he’s suffered a heart attack and been hospitalized, her fears are borne out. Rainer and she set off for the hospital, but by the time they arrive, Italo’s heart has failed, completely.
A year after his friend’s death, Rainer will be retired from his job, forced to do so by the dramatic decline in his faculties that’s been showing early symptoms for longer than he’s wanted to admit. His short-term memory’s crumbling. He loses the thread of a conversation mid-sentence. He forgets the name of the person he’s talking to. He can’t remember the date. Worse, he’s started to slip from English to German unawares, then to become annoyed if whoever he’s speaking with doesn’t understand him. He resists accepting what’s happening to him, which is the cause of several bitter arguments between him and Clara. In the end, his boss will deliver an ultimatum: either Rainer retires, or he’ll be forced to fire him. Protesting the injustice of it all, Rainer opts to tender his resignation. Once he leaves his job, his condition falls off steeply, until he’s little more than an oversized infant. There are moments, when she’s spooning chicken soup past his quivering lips, that Clara will recall the pale light she saw washing over Rainer’s features when he was engrossed in his books, trying to sort out the mess with the Fisherman. She’ll remember the way it blurred her husband’s face, and how she had to fight back the fear that clawed at her at the sight of him. Wiping his chin with a napkin, she’ll think that it’s as if that dead light sunk inside him, bleaching away whatever of him it fell on. When he’s breathed his last, Clara, her eyes dry, will turn to Lottie and tell her that she lost her husband long before this. She lost him to light the color of the full moon, of the froth on top of a wave, of a burial shroud.
XXXI
Before his retirement and death, though, there’s one more matter with which Rainer Schmidt concerns himself, and that’s Dutchman’s Creek. If you go back to older maps of the area, you’ll find sections of streams and creeks that appear to follow some of the same route, but nothing substantial enough to count as a match. At first, the fishermen who come to try its waters assume it is one of those other streams, and that whatever map they’ve consulted is off, or their memories of the place mistaken. Over the course of a couple of years, those fellows talk to one another, compare notes, and gradually, it becomes clear to everyone that this in a new creek. Such things happen, of course: heavy flooding can carry away part of a stream’s bank, open a fresh path for it; a rockslide can push its waters in another direction. This creek runs all the way to the Hudson, through banks steep and thickly forested. Not a few of the men who trade their impressions of it agree that the stream looks as if it’s been there for a goodly number of years. It’s as if the land has unfolded a little extra of itself. No one can remember noticing it, previously, but no one can recall not noticing it, either.
What brings Rainer to it is the notice the creek draws from the Water Authority. A few men have tried, but no one has been able to pinpoint the location of the stream’s headwaters. As you trace it back, the creek appears to be headed directly towards the Reservoir. However, its upper reaches snake through dense woods that seem to confound anyone who ventures too far into them. A couple of fellows were lost for a day and a night amidst the evergreens, and one old man spent upwards of three days wandering the area, as the pines and spruce gave way to tall trees unlike any he’d seen. Through their trunks, he claims to have seen a distant body of water, what he thought was the Reservoir, except the water looked dark. Everyone who hears his story dismisses it as a hallucination brought on by combined exposure and lack of proper nourishment. Concerned about a possible leak, the higher-ups at the Water Authority have had the Reservoir inspected, from dam to weir to bed. Nothing has been found amiss.
This is when Rainer arrives. At first, he hadn’t paid much attention to the talk about the new creek. You might imagine, he isn’t much on fishing. As the talk of the stream has continued, though, his interest has been stirred. The more he’s heard of it, the less Rainer has liked what he’s hearing. It would be easy enough to dismiss the reports of enormous fish whose like no fisherman has seen—and which conveniently snap whatever line has them as they’re on the verge of being landed—as the usual exaggerations of men who’ve used their trip to the woods to sneak a little moonshine. Had Rainer not been through the events at the camp, he might discount the other stories he hears as further evidence of that liquor’s potency. A pair of boys playing hooky is gone much longer than they’d planned when they become lost trying to follow a pale figure they glimpse in the woods upstream. An old man returns to the same spot every day for two weeks, not to fish, but to listen to a voice he swears is that of his son, killed in the War. One member of a fishing party falls into the creek and would likely have drowned were his companions not excellent swimmers; the man insists he saw his brother, dead these many years from pneumonia, staring up at him from beneath the water’s surface. When Clara and Lottie ask him what’s happening, Rainer gives his usual answer—he isn’t sure—but this time around, he doesn’t wait for things to grow worse before he acts. He convinces whoever requires it that his position patrolling the aqueduct makes him perfectly suited for getting to the bottom of this matter, then tells Jacob he’ll have need of him the following Sunday, after church.
It’s a hot, humid afternoon when Jacob parks his car on one side of Tashtego Lane and sets off with his father-in-law in search of the stream. You can be sure, he’s thinking about the last excursion he accompanied Rainer on. They don’t have axes, don’t have any tools, at all, which Jacob hopes is a good sign. They walk a few hundred yards across a meadow to a low ridge. Rainer and Jacob climb the ridge, then half-slide down its far side to the modest valley it forms with the ridge behind it. This second ridge is steeper, taller, an earth and stone wall, but it’s heavily forested with evergreens the men use as handholds to help themselves up it. Just past the top of the hill, he looks down through the spruce and pine and sees a creek white and foaming below. Digging their heels into the soil, zigzagging from tree to tree, he and Rainer descend the hillside, until they’re on the narrow shelf that borders this side of the stream. Maybe a dozen yards over the turbulent water, the other shore is a mirror of theirs, a slender strip of land at the foot of a ridge heavy with trees. On the left, the creek foams down an incline halfway to a waterfall; ahead and on the right, it runs level for ten or fifteen yards before plunging down another set of rapids. Jacob glances at Rainer, who’s staring at the water’s surface. Afraid that his father-in-law is having another of his spells—the name his wife and mother-in-law have given to his moments of blankness—Jacob touches Rainer’s shoulder, whereupon the older man starts, shakes his head, and turns left. “This way,” he says, heading upstream. Over his shoulder, he adds, “You remember from before. If you hear someone, do not listen to them. If you see someone, do not look at them.” Jacob wants to ask how exactly he’s supposed to avoid looking at someone he�
��s seeing, but he understands the gist of Rainer’s instruction, and hurries to keep up with him.
They don’t travel far, for which Jacob is grateful. As the bank they’re walking slants upwards, the mossy earth that covered it gives way to rock made slick by the water’s spray. Although Jacob is aware of something in the creek’s tumult, he’s too busy concentrating on where to plant his next footstep to pay it much notice. (Later, he’ll tell Lottie he had the impression the water was full of white bodies. “Like fish?” she’ll ask. He’ll shake his head.) But even as he leans forward to maintain his balance, all the while watching Rainer above him, pinwheeling his arms to keep from toppling backwards, Jacob hears a voice speaking to him.
His words a whisper in Jacob’s ears, Angelo, the man he struck down with an axe, asks him what he’s doing here. Doesn’t he have a wife to kiss, children to embrace? Doesn’t he live in a nice house, work at a good job? Why, then, is he here, in this place? Has he grown tired of his pleasant life? Does he want to know what Angelo knows? Would he like to raise his eyes to the sight of his companion’s axe flashing towards him? Would he like to feel its edge bite deep into his flesh? Would he like to know the shock that stuns his brain, so that all he can do is stare at the wooden handle of the tool that has killed him, while the blood spills out of him? He could not say his prayers, Angelo continues, could not make a final Act of Contrition. He could only sit there as his thoughts spiraled down a black drain. Even after his heart had stopped beating, he did not leave that place. He remained, watching, as Jacob and the rest of their companions stood around his corpse. He saw Jacob excused of his murder. He witnessed their half-hearted attempt at a funeral, their flight before the black ocean’s rising. He could not escape the water that rolled over him, that picked up his body and carried it far, far out, to the lightless depths where white demons sport amidst the coils of their great and terrible master. He was damned, Angelo says, damned, and he will be happy to share his dark eternity with Jacob: all he has to do is fling himself into the water to his right, and Angelo’s new companions will bring Jacob to him, directly.
For Jacob Schmidt, one act has haunted him these last years, and that, of course, is Angelo’s death. If it is a crime—and how, Jacob thinks, could it be anything but?—then it is as perfect a crime as any ever committed, since it happened in a place to which there would appear to be no chance of anyone ever gaining admission. Not to mention, Angelo’s body must, as his voice insists, have been washed out to sea by the wave pushed up by the great beast’s writhing. Even without any evidence of his act, however, Jacob has continued to carry the burden of it. For the longest time, afraid of the response it might provoke from her, he kept it a secret from Lottie. All through their courtship, the early years of their marriage, the births of their children, Jacob locked away the axe swing that claimed another man’s life, his stutter a convenient excuse on the odd occasions the impulse to confess pricked him. Only when their oldest girl, Greta, was so sick with scarlet fever that the normally cheerful doctor had grown serious and quiet did Jacob reveal his past deed to his wife. Half out of his mind with worry, he’d convinced himself that his daughter was going to be taken from him as a punishment for the life he took, years before. At first, Lottie had no idea what Jacob was babbling on about; once she understood what he was saying, she said, “But my father did not condemn you?”
He didn’t, Jacob admitted.
“Then that should be enough for you,” Lottie said. “Now come help me with our daughter.”
Greta survived her bought with scarlet fever, and while Jacob might have taken that as a sign that the powers-that-be weren’t interested in collecting on his past misdeed, he has not. He’s spent too much time brooding over it for him to be able to release it so easily. Angelo’s voice, here, his litany of reproaches, makes perfect sense to Jacob. It wasn’t his child whose life would be required: it’s his. Jacob is of an age that still believes the taking of your own life is a guaranteed route to eternal damnation, but what else was he expecting? He steps towards the water.
In so doing, he collides with Rainer, who’s come to a stop in front of him. Together, the men almost tumble into the raging stream, which suddenly strikes Jacob as a bad idea. He hauls himself and his father-in-law back from the edge. He’s expecting a correction from Rainer, a “Watch where you’re going!” but the man’s eyes are full of tears. Rainer drags his sleeve across his face, and resumes scaling the incline. Jacob follows.
Already, they’ve reached the top of their climb. Here, the shelf runs level for at least fifty yards. Angelo’s voice has returned, but it’s delivered no more than a half-dozen words when, over his shoulder, Rainer says, “We don’t speak of our life in the old country so much, do we? Sometimes, it seems as if it was a play in which I was cast, along with Clara and the girls. It happened—you could not say it was not real—but it had nothing to do with what our lives were to be. Or, not so much nothing as…” Unable to find the exact word, Rainer substitutes a shrug. “While I was in Heidelberg, at the University, I had a colleague named Wilhelm Vanderwort. He was a philologist, too. I would call him a friend, but that would not be accurate. We had great respect for one another, our work; our conversations were cordial. But we were too much in competition ever to be true friends. Our interest was the same: the languages that came before those we know, the tongues that lay beyond the beginning. Wilhelm was fond of saying that, once his work was finished, he would be able to tell what words Adam and Eve had spoken in the Garden. He had a habit of delivering such pronouncements, which went over well with his students but made his colleagues shake their heads. He was brilliant. With a difficult passage, he was capable of leaps of understanding that would light up the text in new and startling ways. What he was not so good at was the slower work, the careful analysis that made his insights possible, and that built on them, afterwards. This was my strength.
“Our relation might have remained as it was—the tortoise and the hare, I thought of it—but, almost by accident, an old book came into my possession. Mostly, it was written in Middle French, in which I had little interest, but there were passages scattered throughout its pages in a language I had not seen before. The French portions claimed these were examples of exactly what I had been searching for, a tongue from prehistory. I dismissed the idea as ridiculous, but none of my research could find any other instance of these particular characters having been used. In and of itself, this proved nothing. They could have been a private code. But there were…” Rainer waves his hand, “things about these passages that caused me to doubt this. Anyway, the point is, I showed them to Wilhelm and asked for his assistance in translating them.
“At first, he believed I was playing a trick on him. I had to show him the book to prove I wasn’t. He was equally certain the passages could not be what the book said they were, but he was intrigued by the challenge they offered. The book presented what it said were faithful translations of the first half of each selection, leaving the remainder for whoever was interested enough to complete. This gave us something to work with, a key—though a key that was missing some of its teeth, and in danger of snapping off in the lock. We treated the matter as a puzzle, half a joke. We talked about writing a paper on a hitherto-unknown instance of a secret medieval code.”
To either side of Jacob and Rainer, the ridges that have dropped so starkly to the water’s edge lean back. Ahead, the stream curves to the right. Rainer says, “Everything changed when I obtained another book, this one rarer than the one with which we were working. I leafed through it, and found myself looking at a fresh example of the language Wilhelm and I had been laboring over. It was as if I had been struck by lightning. I rushed out of the house to find Wilhelm in his office at the University and show it to him. It appeared we were onto something of genuine significance.
“How significant, we did not appreciate until we began our attempts to speak what had until now been confined to paper. The second book had provided us with a great many c
lues as to how this might be accomplished, along with cryptic warnings about the need for care in doing so. We dismissed these as rhetorical flourishes inserted to lend the text a more ominous character. We were wrong. The first word we tried to pronounce was ‘dark.’ It was among the most common of the words we’d encountered, and we felt confident we had its pronunciation settled. Although we scoffed at the second book’s warnings, we waited until a Sunday when my family was safely asleep to attempt our experiment. We shut the door to my study, and uttered the word.
“The room was plunged into blackness. I did not understand what had happened; I thought something had gone wrong with the lamp. This did not explain why the hall light was not visible at the bottom of the study’s door—or, for the matter, what had become of the city lights outside the window. The blackness was so complete, we might have been in a deep cave. I stumbled around, searching for the lamp, crashing into my desk and spilling books and papers onto the floor. A kind of panic was wrapping its hands around my throat; I was finding it difficult to breathe in this darkness.
“Then Wilhelm Vanderwort spoke a second word, and light, wonderful, rich, creamy light returned to the study. You will have guessed the word: it was ‘light.’ We had disagreed about the placement of the stresses in it, but it appeared Wilhelm’s interpretation was correct. As soon as the study had become dark, he had apprehended what I had not, that the word that had passed our lips had done this. This was no language such as we had known, in which a word points in the direction of its object. Instead, this was a tongue which was woven into—into everything,” Rainer sweeps his hands around him, “so that to name something was to call it forth.