The Fisherman

by John Langan

  “To you, who was part of the business with the Fisherman, this will not sound too strange. To us—well, you can imagine. This was more, much, much more, than a pair of university scholars had expected, ever. Our aspirations had been for a certain, limited fame within our community—to be one of those figures who excites the admiration of his juniors, and the respect and envy of his peers. Now…”

  They’ve reached the place where the creek swings to the right. Rainer leaves the bank, heading for the rows of trees in front of them. He and Jacob walk in amongst their ranks a good fifteen, twenty yards, until they arrive at a low wall of the kind common in these parts, flat stones of assorted dimensions dug from the earth and layered together. Rainer turns and seats himself on it. Jacob remains standing. Rainer says, “Through the merchant who had provided the books for me, I made inquiries. Eventually, Wilhelm and I were put in touch with a small group of men who were familiar with the language we had begun translating, and more, besides. They were impressed with what we had achieved on our own, enough to accept us as…apprentices, you could say. There was a great deal to learn. There were other tongues, more ancient—and more powerful—still. There were histories of the peoples who had employed these languages, their beliefs, their customs, their rises and falls. There were maps of places that lie beside, below, the one we inhabit; there were accounts of their denizens.

  “In our new passion, Wilhelm and I were as competitive as we had been in our previous one. Each of us did his best to show up the other. We spurred one another forward, faster, ever-faster, till we were standing in front of a large door set in the wall of a deep basement in one of Heidelberg’s newer buildings. You would have recognized the fellow with the iron ring in his mouth: we saw his likeness on the door of the Fisherman’s big house. One of our instructors took hold of the ring and pulled the door open. The basement was at least twenty feet underground, but when we looked through the doorway, we saw an alleyway. Wilhelm strode out of the basement into the alley as if it were the most natural thing. Trying to act as if I shared his calm, I crossed after him. We had come to…

  “There are cities built along the shores of the black ocean. This was one of them. It was neither the largest nor the oldest of these places, but it was of sufficient size and age for our instructors’ purposes. They had set us to a task—a kind of examination—to determine if Wilhelm and I were ready to proceed to the next stage in our learning. Our mission was simple: we were to make our way to the other side of the city, where we would find its necropolis. There, we were to locate a certain grave, and pluck from it a flower we would find growing in its soil. This was not as easy as you might suppose. Not only was the flower rare, it was regarded by the city’s populace as the soul of the priest who was buried under it. To remove such a plant was considered a mix of heresy and murder. The streets were full of police, tall shapes dressed in black cloaks and wearing masks fashioned to resemble the curved beaks of birds of prey; they were armed with long, curved knives, which they would use without hesitation on any they caught engaged in a criminal activity such as ours. The geography of the city was strange, contradictory. Streets ended unexpectedly in blank walls, or climbed bridges which came to a stop high in the air; they arrived at circular courtyards from which a dozen alleyways branched out. We had to guide ourselves by the stars burning overhead. These were not arranged in the familiar constellations. Here, the images they drew had been given names such as the Rider, the Staff, and the Garland of Fruit.

  “We succeeded. It was a difficult journey, which brought us frightfully near the figures in the bird-masks, but we found the plot of earth and the moon-colored flower rising from it in a slender arc. I removed it, Wilhelm concealed it in the folds of his jacket, and we navigated back to the alley whose end returned us to the basement in Heidelberg. We were exhausted, triumphant, and we passed what few hours remained of that night in celebration with our mentors. One of them had left with the flower, but the others were happy to share an assortment of very fine liquors with us. As dawn was breaking, we staggered off to our homes, shouting old songs, flushed with self-importance.

  “By the afternoon of the next day, our triumph had turned to disaster. Wilhelm was on time for his scheduled lecture on Ancient Greek, but from the start, the students noticed something wrong with him. He did not speak with his usual gusto; instead, his voice was measured, even pained. He was well-known for moving around while he talked, pacing the front of the hall, gesturing dramatically with his hands. Today, he did not leave the lectern. A student said he appeared to be propping himself up on it. His face was pale, his eyes sunken, his hair a mess. Of course, all of that could have been attributed to the consequences of mixing considerable quantities of potent liquors. It never fails to astound students that their teachers may fall prey to the same lapses in judgment as they do, with the result that they might mistake a bad hangover for a terrible illness. But there was no confusing the black lines that had started to snake across Wilhelm’s cheeks, his forehead, as if some hidden artist were tracing them. Nor could the darkening of his tongue, his teeth, escape the notice of the students seated nearest him. Not long into his remarks, Wilhelm began coughing, and it seemed to some of the closer students that, with each spasm of his lungs, the black lines spread over more of his face, until it resembled a porcelain mask whose surface was a network of cracks. His coughing continued, doubling him over. When he raised his head, there were little pieces of his cheeks, his forehead, missing, as if the porcelain mask was falling apart. Where the skin had been, there was no muscle, no bone, only blackness. Before the horrified eyes of almost one hundred students, Wilhelm Vanderwort collapsed in a shower of dust and darkness, leaving nothing of himself behind but his clothing and his shoes.

  “This was what led to me being dismissed from the University. Questions were asked, my name came up, conversations were had, and in no time, I was readying my family to leave for America. I could have fought the move to oust me; I might have succeeded, too. I was well-liked, and had not divided my colleagues the way Wilhelm had. As it was, I did not argue my expulsion. It was, I felt, the least I deserved for what I had allowed to happen to Wilhelm.” Rainer looks at Jacob. “I knew that, if the flower we had been sent for was not transported in the appropriate manner—wound about three times with a piece of cloth torn from the foot of a shroud—then the consequences for whoever was carrying it would be dire. I had come prepared for the task, but Wilhelm insisted he be the one to convey the object of our quest to our instructors. I asked him if he had brought the necessary materials. He laughed at me. ‘Don’t be such an old woman,’ he said. I was halfway to passing him the length of cloth I had rolled up in my jacket pocket, but the sound of his laughter stayed my hand. I thought, Fine. You can do this your way, if that is what you want. And let the blade that is to fall, fall on you. Which it did. But I was cut by it, as well, which I suppose was just. In the aftermath of the scandal, our former instructors would have nothing to do with me. I tell myself that this was a good thing.”

  Rainer nods at the stream. “Here, though…Wilhelm tells me that I killed him. As surely as if I had poured poison into his coffee, I murdered him. Worse, he says, I did not have the courage to see my crime all the way through. Instead, I indulged my conscience, and threw away everything the two of us had worked so hard for. Now, he is dust, dust which remembers what it was to be a man and can do nothing with that knowledge. He curses me. He damns me as a coward and a fraud.”

  His tongue fighting him, Jacob asks his father-in-law where, exactly, they are.

  Standing, Rainer says, “You are thinking, maybe, that this place is familiar?” He steps over the wall and walks ten feet to a young tree. He places his left hand against its trunk, his head bowed, and stands like that for a moment. Then he raises his head, reaches into the front pocket of his trousers, and withdraws a knife. It’s a silver dinner knife, like the one Rainer employed against Helen, all those years ago; Jacob has an intuition that this is that sam
e knife. In a series of quick strokes, Rainer slashes the tree. He must have sharpened the blade, Jacob thinks, because it opens deep grooves in the bark. When he’s done, Rainer takes a step back to survey his work. Jacob looks past him to the tree, but he can make no sense of the marks struck in it—though they produce the strangest sensation of calm. His concentration loosens. It’s difficult to recall what he and Rainer are doing here. He turns in the direction he came and is most of the way to the stream before he remembers his father-in-law. Cheeks flushed, he runs back to the wall and hurdles it. Careful to avert his eyes from the tree, he approaches Rainer, whose position is unchanged. He is gazing past the tree into the woods, as if he can discern something within them. Jacob risks a glance in that direction, but cannot make out anything other than row after row of trees. He hears Rainer murmuring a word that he does not recognize; it sounds like “Thalassa, thalassa.” As Jacob draws up to him, Rainer turns, a grimace on his face, and sets off towards the car.

  XXXII

  The walk back is less eventful. While they’re beside the stream, Angelo’s voice resumes its accusations, but its volume is diminished, to the point Jacob could believe he’s imagining it within the roar of the water, the way you might see a face within the grain of a piece of wood. Neither he nor Rainer speaks again until they’ve scaled the ridges that conceal the creek and are crossing the field to the car. There, Jacob asks Rainer if the problem has been solved.

  “As much as it can be,” Rainer says. “The mark on the tree will turn aside most who come near it. It is the best we can do, without a human sacrifice.”

  Jacob tells himself that his father-in-law is joking—although Rainer is not smiling.

  XXXIII

  At some point in the nineteen-twenties, a year or two after Jacob and Rainer’s visit to it, the locals start referring to the new stream as Deutschman’s Creek, which rapidly becomes Dutchman’s Creek. Who originates the name, and why, is lost to history, but by the early thirties, the name and the stream have made their way onto maps of the area. Once she’s heard the full story of the Fisherman from Jacob, Lottie will complain about the name. Ever the stickler for detail, she says that the Fisherman’s Creek would be more accurate. Jacob doesn’t argue with her, but he suggests that they take the name as a kind of memorial to her father. That’s ridiculous, Lottie says, whoever named the stream could not have known anything about her father. Jacob can see, however, that the notion secretly pleases his wife. It helps her to recall her father as he was before the affliction that took him from her. Rather than the frail man who once was lost for almost a week, when he wandered away from his job into a work camp down in Orange County, she can picture him stepping into their undersized house after a day’s labor with his fellow stonemasons, a handkerchief knotted around his neck, his shirt and trousers powdered with a fine dust. Jacob can almost share her vision, except that, in his imagining of it, Rainer’s face is washed by white light.

  There are moments, as the years slide by and their children grow, as Jacob’s boss makes him a partner in the monument business, as the country plunges into the Great Depression, as another war with Germany looms, that neither Jacob nor Lottie can fully credit the events they were part of at the camp. All of it seems like a book they read, a movie they watched. After Jacob’s death, from lung cancer, in late nineteen fifty-one, that sensation of unreality will assail Lottie more often. She’ll have vivid dreams in which she’s back in the house in Heidelberg, with the heavy oak table that has been in her mother’s family for four generations, and the cabinet full of Dresden china, and the long lace curtains that her Aunt Gretchen made for her parents as a wedding present. When she wakes in her bed with the lumpy mattress and the fraying blankets, and looks at the plain dresser, its top crowded with pictures of her family, and the open closet, still hung with Jacob’s clothes—though she keeps saying she’ll sort through them and give what’s in decent condition to charity—Lottie will be swept by the certainty that this is the dream. This life in which she left her home for a country whose language has never felt right on her tongue, where she once stood face to face with a woman who had been dead, where she married and bore children to a shy man from Austria who expressed himself more elegantly through the work of his hands than through his speech: it’s all the invention, the yield of an adolescent imagination desperate for experience. If only she could find her way back to the blank space that borders dreaming and remain there long enough to navigate its gray emptiness, then the next time she opens her eyes, it will be to Clara calling her to come downstairs to kiss her father before he’s off to the University.

  She’s never able to stay in that empty place, to slip out of it into her old existence. Instead, she’ll rise from her bed and cross to the dresser. She’ll slide out the top drawer, and search beneath the undergarments layered within it until her fingers touch the edge of a small box. It’s the kind of reinforced cardboard box that a department store would use for a piece of jewelry. Lottie will lift it out and set it on top of the dresser. She’ll open the lid and part the tissue paper inside it, exposing the piece of metal concealed by its folds.

  It’s a fishhook. It’s a couple of inches long, no different from what you might tie to the end of your line. The metal is tarnished, crusted with a dark substance that Lottie would tell you is her late husband’s blood. This is the hook that stuck into Jacob’s cheek, right below his eye, when his axe severed the Fisherman’s line and the power it contained burst outwards, spraying the hooks that had dangled from it in all directions. So stunned and exhausted from that adventure had Jacob been that he had walked to the bunkhouse and collapsed onto his bed with the hook lodged in his flesh. The next day, he awakened with his cheek swollen and painful. A bunkmate pulled the hook free, releasing a pocket of pus and blood and leaving Jacob with a small white scar. Jacob kept the hook folded in a handkerchief. Once Lottie learned of its existence, she asked for the hook, which Jacob presented to her in the jewelry box. She’ll pinch it between her thumb and index finger and hold it up to the light. She’ll do the same for the Reverend Mapple, near the end of her long life and at the end of the fantastic tale she’s told him. He’ll squint at the curved bit of metal in her fingers, its surface patterned with the blood of a man long dead, its barbed point still sharp.

  Part 3:

  On the Shore of the Black Ocean

  IV

  Words Read

  by Traffic Light

  His story done, Howard seemed relieved, as if that burden I’d sensed behind his words at the beginning of his tale had passed from him. I felt oddly disoriented, disconnected from the diner’s chrome and glass, the way you do after you’ve finished a book or movie in which you’ve been absorbed and which hasn’t loosened its hold on you. Dan and I could take what he’d told us or leave it, Howard said, but he’d recommend taking it, and maybe giving Onteora Lake, which was just up the road, a try. With that, he ambled back to the kitchen.

  Outside the diner’s windows, rain fell in a wall that gave me the momentary sensation we were at the bottom of the sea. I half-expected to see the shadow of some enormous fish glide past. I shook my head and reached for my wallet. Not until after Dan and I had paid our check, and run through the rain to my truck, and I had turned right out of the diner’s parking lot onto 28, did I say, “What in the hell was all that?”

  Dan shook his head. “Crazy.”

  “Crazy…” That was one word for it. I was annoyed, the way you are when you aren’t sure if someone’s had you on or not. I know: how could Howard have been doing anything else? Dead people standing up and walking around, black magic, monsters: it was the stuff of a scary movie, a fishing yarn gone feral. I was pretty sure that Dan and I had just had our legs pulled so hard, we’d be tilting to one side. Howard had said he’d wanted to be a writer; I had the strong suspicion he’d just related his first novel to us.

  But…while I couldn’t credit the stranger events he’d related, let alone the outright fantastic ones, no
t once during his story had Howard given me the impression he was lying. Which, I knew, was the hallmark of an accomplished liar. But there was something to his words, some undercurrent, that hinted at a modicum of truth to them, and that irritated me more than anything. He had seemed unhappy with the tale he’d related to us, as if he hadn’t liked its details any more than he expected us to.

  All the same, those details. If, as the saying goes, that’s where the devil is, then half of hell seemed to be crowded into this story. I mean, magic symbols carved with kitchen knives? Ropes braided with fishing hooks? Axe blades dipped in a dead man’s blood? The rain eased, the air lightening as the sun struggled to push through the clouds. Not to mention, that business with the painter fellow, Otto, cutting his throat after he saw the woman in black.

  Despite myself, I stepped on the brake. What the hell was that I was remembering? Howard hadn’t said anything about a painter, had he? Where was that coming from? I eased into the left-turn lane by the barbecue place. Trying to keep my voice light, I said, “You’re sure you want to fish this place?”

  “Are you serious?” Dan said.

  I didn’t answer; instead, I steered left onto 28A and headed west, towards the southern edge of the Reservoir. It was a route I’d taken plenty of times, first with Marie when we went for a Sunday drive, then by myself when I was searching for places to fish, then with Dan when I took him to some of those fishing spots. This morning, the road seemed more narrow, its curves harder to navigate my truck around. At every bend, water streamed across it, and the tires shimmied when they hit it. Their branches weighted with the rain, the trees that grew thick by the sides of the road reached down to us. One of the limbs dragged over the roof of the cab, and the metal shrieked.