The Fisherman (34 page)

When we were still halfway there, I saw that the multitude of forms on the beach were the same fish-belly pale as Marie. I had no doubt the eyes of every last one of them would be gold. I was less certain of their features, and of what my reaction would be to a school of the creatures I’d glimpsed in Marie’s place. Their activity was focused on the heap of sharp stones that marked this end of the rock wall; as we closed to a quarter mile, I made out long ropes spanning the distance from stones to beach. There were dozens of thick ropes, each one attached to a different spot on what I saw was a much more substantial formation than I had appreciated, each one gripped by anywhere from five to ten of the white figures, at points ranging from far up the beach’s slope to well into the water. The ropes creaked with a sound like a big house in a bad storm. The forms holding them grunted and gasped with their effort.

That I could see, only one of the ropes was not held by ten or twenty hands. This rope ran from a horizontal crack in the formation near the water’s edge to a sizable boulder on shore, which the rope wrapped around three or four times. It was to this spot that Marie headed. Doing my best not to look directly at any of the pale shapes amongst whom I now was passing, I followed. Although having the knife in my hand lent me the illusion of security, I wasn’t sure if the things would take it as a provocation, so I slid my hand into the pocket of my raincoat and kept it there.

The boulder that was our destination was as large as a small house, a stone cube whose edges had been rounded by wind and time. We angled towards the water to reach the side of the rock that faced the ocean. In between watching my steps, I studied the pile of stone to which our goal was tethered. Separated from the beach by a narrow, churning strip of water, the formation was several hundred yards long, its steep sides half that in height. Its top was capped by huge splinters and shards of rock, the apparent remains of even larger stones that had been snapped by some vast cataclysm. The entire surface of the structure was covered in fissures and cracks. Some of the ropes the white creatures held were anchored in these gaps with what looked to be oversized hooks dug into the openings; while other ropes lassoed the ragged rocks on the formation’s crest. I could not guess what enterprise the multitude of ropes was being employed toward; their arrangement was too haphazard for any kind of construction I could envision. I almost would have believed the mass of pale figures was engaged in tearing down the splintered endpoint, but their method of doing so was, to put it mildly, impractical.

For some time, in the midst of the other sounds of sea and strain surrounding me, I’d been conscious of another noise, a metallic jingle that seemed to come from all over the place. Only when we were at the large boulder did I understand what I was hearing: the sound of the hundreds, of the thousands, of fishhooks woven into and dangling from the rope that encircled the stone, swinging into one another as the rope shifted. There were hooks, I saw, strung along all the ropes.

You can be sure, throughout the journey Marie had taken me on, Howard’s story had not been far from my thoughts. How could it have been anywhere else, right? But the sight of all those curved bits of metal, some wound tightly into the rope’s fibers, others tied to those fibers by their eyes, a few of sufficient size to be hung on the rope properly—more than the Vivid Trees, or the black ocean, more than Marie, even, this was the detail that made me think,
Oh my God. I believe old Howard was telling the truth. Or close enough.
As Marie led me around to what I thought of as the front of the boulder, the man who was bound to it came into view, and any doubts that might have remained were swept away by the sight of the rope that crossed him from right hip to left shoulder, secured to him by the fishhooks that dug through the leather apron and worn robes to his flesh. The rope circled the stone behind him a few times, then ran out across the black waves to the end of the barrier.

The strangest thing was, I recognized this man. I’d met him in the woods on the way here, speaking a language I didn’t understand, until Marie chased him off. What had been a matter of an hour, less, for me, had been much, much longer for him. At a glance, you might have mistaken him for my age, a tad older, but subject him to closer inspection, and the number of years piled on him was apparent. This fellow had seen enough time pass that he should have crumbled to dust several times over. His skin was more like parchment paper, and his face was speckled with some kind of barnacle. All the color had been washed from his eyes. They flicked toward me, and a spark of recognition flared in them. He didn’t speak, though; he left that to Dan.

Dan was sitting cross-legged at the man’s feet, his back to him and me. To his right, a slender naked woman, her skin pale as pearl, sat leaning against him. To his left, a pair of toddler boys, their bare bodies equally white, crawled in and out of his lap. His hat and raincoat were gone, his hair tousled, his clothes rumpled, as if he’d slept in them. When he turned to me, the stubble shadowing his face, way later than five o’clock, reinforced my impression that he’d already spent some time in this place. “Abe,” he said. “I was wondering if you’d make it.”

“Here I am.”

Marie lowered herself to the ground next to the woman beside Dan—to Sophie. Dan eased himself from under Sophie, helped the boy who was crawling off him the rest of the way down, and stood, the wince as he did testament to how long he must have been holding that position. He smiled at Sophie. “This is my wife, Sophie.” His hand swept over the boys. “And these young men are Jason and Jonas.” The three of them swiveled their heads to regard me with flat, gold eyes.

“Dan,” I said, “what is all this?”

“Isn’t it obvious? It’s what your friend was telling us about, at the diner. He got some of the details wrong, but as far as the big picture goes, he was pretty much on target.”

“Big—I don’t know what that means.” I inclined my head to the man bound to the rock. “Is this the Fisherman?”

Dan nodded. “He doesn’t say much. All of his energy is focused on…” He pointed to the end of the barrier and its web of ropes.

“Which is what, exactly?”

“I guess you could call it the great-grandfather of all fishing stories.”

“The…” My voice died in my mouth. I must have noticed it during the walk to this spot, observed the odd striations in the stone of which the barrier was composed, even made the comparison to the scales of a titanic reptile. I must have seen the way the end of the barrier curved out and around from the main body the way the head of a snake flares from its neck. Maybe I’d likened the broken rocks ornamenting its crest to the ridges and horns that decorate the skulls of some serpents; maybe I’d judged the crack in which the Fisherman’s rope was lodged to be in the approximate location of an eye, were this headland an actual head. Whatever I’d imagined, I’d done so because this was what you did when you saw something new, especially something large: you found the patterns in it, saw the profiles of giants in the outlines of mountains, found dragons rearing in the clouds overhead. It was a game your mind played with unfamiliar terrain, not an act of recognition, for God’s sake. Of course it explained what all the ropes were for, identified the task towards which all the pale things were bent, but it was ridiculous, it was impossible, you could not have a creature that size, it violated I didn’t know how many laws of nature.

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.