Authors: John Langan
“Come again?” I glanced at Dan. His eyes big, he was staring past me at the fish. “That isn’t,” he said. “Look at it, Abe.
Look at it.
”
“Okay,” I said, “okay.” I did, and what Dan had seen slipped into focus for me. “Jesus!” I shouted, jumping back and colliding with him. “What the hell?”
The fish’s face, as I’ve said, was rounded, its eyes a pair of large, forward-facing sockets. No doubt, its resemblance to a human skull had factored into my initial shock at its appearance. What I’d been too concerned with bringing the thing in to realize was that the face wasn’t shaped like a skull, it was shaped around a skull. Imagine a good-sized fish, something like a salmon, whose head has been cut away. In its place, someone has set a human skull, stretching the fish’s skin over the bone to hold it there. Finally, whoever has performed this bizarre transplant has given his new creation a mouth, a slit at the bottom of its face whose bloodless gums are jammed with fangs like a drawer of knives. Behind its gills, a sizable pair of pectoral fins splayed on the rock, while a smaller set of ventral fins spread out nearer the tail, whose top lobe drooped to the left. The sight of it hurt my eyes to behold. I wanted to turn my head; the breakfast boiled at the back of my mouth. Maybe there was a natural explanation for what I dragged out of the pool, but if there was, I didn’t want anything to do with the nature that could fashion such a creature. At the same time, I could not stop looking at the fish, which blew out air through its forest of teeth in a tired grunt.
“It was in my grandfather’s fishing journal,” Dan said.
I had no response—had no notion what he was talking about.
“He was a fisherman, too,” Dan said. His voice shook with the strain of the sight before us. “He and my dad used to go fishing on weekends. Sometimes, they took me. Not too often, but sometimes. He kept a record of the places he’d fished. It was just a ruled notebook, the kind of thing you get for school. He was pretty thorough. For each spot, he recorded the date he went, the hours he spent there, the weather, the condition of the water, the lures he used, and the fish he caught. Once in a while, he’d add a comment underneath the data: ‘Good luck above dam,’ or, ‘Hooked huge catfish near 32 bridge but lost him.’ When he returned to a site, he updated the entry in different-colored ink. I never knew about his journal. He wasn’t exactly what you’d called a forthcoming man. It wouldn’t have mattered much if I had been aware of it. I liked to fish, but I wasn’t interested in that kind of exhaustive note-taking.
“Then, this past February, my cousin, Martine, came to visit with her family. I think I told you about that. Right at the last possible minute, as they’re loading the car for the trip back to Cincinnati, she reaches into her suitcase and comes out with Grandpa’s journal. ‘Here,’ she says. I had no idea what she was handing me. She’d had the book bound in leather, with ‘Fishing Journal’ embossed on the cover in gold lettering. I thought it was a blank book, and she was going to tell me to write my feelings in it. She teaches high school English, and we’d talked about that. Well, she’d talked about it, as what she called a ‘therapeutic exercise.’
“But no, it was our grandfather’s record of his fishing trips. Her mother had come into possession of it after Grandpa’s death, and she gave it to Martine. I couldn’t figure out what Aunt Eileen would have wanted with the notebook. From what I understood, she’d always been focused on religion, to the point she’d flirted with converting to Catholicism, so she could become a nun. No one had mentioned her being interested in fishing. She wasn’t, Martine said. Her mother hated fishing. She was jealous of it, of the time and attention Grandpa gave to it, and of him sharing it with my father. I had no idea; no one else did, either. I’m surprised she didn’t burn the journal, you know, take revenge that way. When Martine’s older son, Robin, was born, her mother passed the journal to her, for the baby. Robin wasn’t interested in fishing, though; neither was his younger sister. My cousin left the journal in her dresser drawer, said she’d practically forgotten it. Then, after,” his voice hitched, “everything happened with Sophie and the kids, and you and I started fishing together, Martine remembered our grandfather’s notebook. She dug it out from underneath the socks and underwear and decided it would be of more use to me than it had been to anyone in her family. She found a place to give the journal a nice binding, and here it was. ‘I hope you’ll find something in these pages that will be of help to you,’ she said.
“It was a while before I looked inside the notebook. To be honest, Abe, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep fishing with you. No reflection on you: I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue fishing, period. You probably noticed, things with me got a little worse this winter. I know I kind of fell apart that night you had me over for dinner. As long as we were fishing, I was—I wasn’t good, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I was able to go from one day to the next. After the season ended, and I put away my rod and tacklebox in the spare room, everything became harder. It didn’t happen overnight. There were still the holidays and visits from family to distract me. But more and more, it seemed to me I was caught, trapped in a whirlpool that had swept me in the morning that truck—that truck…”
Dan shook his head fiercely, tearing his gaze from the thing in front of us. Focusing on me, instead, he said, “A maelstrom: that’s what they call an especially big and bad whirlpool, the kind of funnel in the ocean that could draw down a ship. I was in a maelstrom, spun around and around a cone of black water, my wife and my children somewhere in there with me, their screams and cries impossible to pinpoint. The longer it had hold of me, the harder it was to believe that there had been anything else, any standing beside the Svartkil talking about work and waiting for a bite. All of those trips, those days sitting on the bank of this stream or that, were a dream, a delusion I’d foisted on myself to escape that relentless spin. Do you know—where the accident happened, they put a light, there.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Most mornings, I drive down there. We’re talking three, four a.m., when it still feels like nighttime. I have trouble sleeping very long. I pull off the road, turn off the car, and sit staring at that light.”
“I know,” I said.
“You do?”
“You told me,” I said, “the night you came over for dinner.”
“I did?”
“After a lot of wine.”
“Oh.” For a moment, the thread of Dan’s narrative appeared to have slipped through his fingers. “Huh,” he said. “Okay. So. I watch the traffic light and think about things. I probably said what kind of things, didn’t I?”
“Yeah.”
“Night after night—or morning after morning—it’s the same. The light cycles through its commands and the maelstrom drags me deeper. I’m aware how bad conditions at work are, and I understand that I’m inviting management to add my head to the pile of those they’ve hacked off, already, but I can’t muster enough concern to lead to any action. I watch the green replaced by yellow, yellow by red, and…”
“Yeah.”
“Then, one morning, I glance at the passenger’s seat and there’s Grandpa’s fishing journal. I can’t remember putting it there—can’t remember why I would have put it there—but that’s all right. I go through a lot of my day on autopilot, I’ve noticed. Maybe I thought it was something else. Doesn’t matter. My curiosity’s been pricked. I pick up the book and start turning the pages. They’re stiff with the dried ink. As I go, I recognize some of the names he’s written. The Esopus. The Rondout. The Svartkil. I pause at some of the entries, trace my finger over the words as I try to decipher the old man’s handwriting. He caught whatever would take his hook, but it seems he preferred catfish. Caught an enormous channel cat right where the Rondout empties into the Hudson. Reading his notes, re-creating the days he’d had—it’s comforting, in a strange kind of way. I look at the pages for places I haven’t been. I see an entry for Dutchman’s Creek.”
I don’t mind saying, I was feeling a tad story’d-out. First Howard’s extravaganza, and now Dan’s more restrained example, and in the meantime, a human skull wrapped in translucent skin was grinning at me over a mouth of fangs. “So that’s how you found out about this place,” I said. “Great. Now—”
“‘Saw Eva,’” Dan said. “That’s why we’re here. Underneath all the usual information, he’d written those two words. Eva was his wife—my grandmother. She died in 1945, on New Year’s Day. A stroke, I think. My dad was only seven at the time, and was never able to find out exactly what had happened. Anyway, the point is, the entry Grandpa made for Dutchman’s Creek was dated July 1953. My grandmother had been dead eight and a half years, which means she couldn’t have accompanied him on the trip.
“I know.” Dan held up his hand, palm outward, a cop halting the protest about to leave my mouth. “I flipped to the first page of the book and checked the date. He’d started this log in May of 1948. This wasn’t an earlier entry that had been misdated. I checked the other pages in the journal, every last one of them. There were no other references to seeing my grandmother. It wasn’t some kind of code for a good day of fishing. It was—I didn’t know what it was. Saw Eva.”
“Did he ever go back to Dutchman’s Creek?” I said.
“No. At least, not that he recorded in the notebook. He continued fishing for a long time after that. I wondered why he hadn’t returned. I mean, this was the place where he’d seen the woman he’d lost, and suddenly at that. How could he have gone anyplace else? Unless—unless whatever he’d seen, whatever glimpse of her he’d had, had been enough. We talk about that, don’t we? ‘Oh, if only I had a chance to say all the things I should’ve to her.’ ‘If only I could have one last hour with her, or half an hour, or ten minutes.’ What if he’d said what he’d wanted to say? What if he’d had that hour? Would that have been enough?
“And yes, I realize how this sounds. From the start, I knew what it sounded like, a grieving husband and father, trapped in denial, unable to transition out of it. I couldn’t ask my grandfather about the entry: he died in ’75. I went to visit my dad in his nursing home, but he’s half-senile. From what I could tell, he wasn’t along for the trip to Dutchman’s Creek; nor had Grandpa spoken to him about it. Mom’s been gone since ’88. I called my brother and sister, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, but none of them could remember Grandpa mentioning Dutchman’s Creek, much less, encountering Grandma, there.
“Of course I checked the map. I had to find out if the place was even real. Took me a couple of tries, but once I could put my finger on it, follow its course to the Hudson, somehow, that made Grandpa’s words seem that much more convincing, you know?”
The nutty thing was, I did. At least, I could recognize the train of wishful thinking Dan had boarded. I said, “That was when you decided we had to come here.”
“You’re always looking for new fishing spots,” Dan said. “Tell me you aren’t.”
“Fishing spots,” I said, “not…” I waved my hand at the weird fish, the murky pool I’d drawn it from, “this.”
“Saw Eva, Abe, saw Eva.” All the strain had long since left Dan’s voice, as the beast on the rock went from frightening monster to sign that his hopes for Dutchman’s Creek had been justified. “He saw her. My grandfather saw my grandmother, his wife, who had been dead for years. I—morning after morning, I sat in my car at that light with the fishing journal propped against the wheel, open to that entry, to those words. When the light turned the page red, the letters were darker, almost blurred at the edges. When it clunked over to green, the words were lighter, harder to see. Only when the light switched to yellow did the words return to normal. Saw Eva. What were the chances, right? That I could see Sophie, Jason, Jonas. That I could speak to them, tell them—everything. Tell Sophie she was the best thing that had ever happened to me, that I wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far in life as I had without her, that I was sorry I’d pushed off as much of caring for the boys onto her as I had. Tell the boys how much better they had made my life—our life—apologize for not having been more patient with them when they were still so small. Tell them I loved them, I loved them, I loved them, and that being without them was killing me. Saw Eva—why not, Saw Sophie? Saw Jonas? Saw Jason? What about you? Wouldn’t you like to be able to say, Saw Marie?”
“You can leave Marie out of this,” I said. The sound of her name snapped whatever hold the fish had on me. I turned my head away from it, and pushed myself up onto legs that had gone to sleep from sitting too long. Wincing, I said, “I have no idea what in the hell this thing is. But it’s a fish. This is a stream. That’s all.”
If I was anticipating an argument from Dan, he disabused me of that expectation right away. Nodding at the fish, he said, “I figure this must have originated upstream. Where I was fishing, the water flows into a wide bed that’s too shallow for something this size to have swum up it.” He retreated a step. “I guess it’s back the way we came. Are you with me?”
“Dan,” I said.
Without another word, he set off upstream, walking at a brisk pace.
“Dan!” I called after him. He did not acknowledge me. “Goddamnit.” For a moment, I was caught between conflicting priorities. Whatever my doubts about his present mental state—in fact, because of those reservations—I was not about to let my friend go wandering away on some insane quest. At the same time, I had pulled a fish from this pool that was unlike any that had been fished in this area—in every area, I was willing to bet. The thing appeared motionless, but there was at least a chance of it convulsing itself into the water. Were it to remain on the ledge, a passing predator or predators might be drawn by its smell and make a meal of it. I realize how cold-blooded this must sound. How could I have debated my choice at all, right? Chalk part of it up to anger. Dan’s account of the actual source of his information about the Creek—not to mention, his motivation for bringing us here—had kindled the annoyance I’d felt since his outburst at the truck into genuine ire. Along with that emotion had come another, unease, shading into outright fear. Not so much for Dan’s sanity: I was concerned about it, yes, but I thought I understood what had happened to his mind. What made my palms sweat and my heart quicken was the fish lying on the stone in front of me, the skull embedded in its flesh. Was the skull even human? The eye-sockets looked more pronounced than they should have, the brown sloped back at too sharp an angle. I had told Dan this creature was a fish, because it had to be, there was no way for it to be anything other than a fish. Except, I didn’t quite believe my assertion. The thing was impossible, yet here it was. If so fantastic a creature could take my lure, then maybe what Dan’s grandfather had written in his journal wasn’t so out of the question, after all. Which meant that the story Howard had told us might not have been complete bullshit, after all.