The Fisherman (35 page)

“Has Marie acted the way you remember her acting?”

“She has.”

“Then what more do you need?”

The more I needed was not to have seen that other, inhuman face staring back at me when I turned toward her; it was not having witnessed Marie’s transfiguration into the savaged figure who had screamed at the younger version of the man bound to the boulder. I was on the verge of saying so, but something in the expressions of Sophie and the boys, a kind of attentiveness, chased the nerve from me. I settled for, “I don’t know.”

“It’s hard,” Dan said, “I understand. But you know, you could help.”

“Oh?”

Dan disengaged himself from his family and approached me. “You could have Marie back, all the time. You could make up for those lost years.”

“I could.” I considered her, still sitting with her back to me, facing the black ocean and its monstrous resident. “How, exactly, could I do that?”

“Like I said, the Fisherman is weak.”

“And he could use my strength.”

“Yes.”

I thought about it; I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. Whatever this Marie was, she wasn’t my Marie, just as I was certain this Sophie and twins weren’t Dan’s Sophie and twins. Maybe that didn’t matter; maybe it would be enough to stay with this echo of my dead wife as the Fisherman siphoned the vitality from me. Might be, I wouldn’t notice myself any weaker, too caught up in the illusion I’d surrendered to. At another moment in my life, when my grief was as proximate as Dan’s, I wouldn’t have debated the offer at all.

Now, though, I shook my head and said, “No, Dan, I’m afraid not.”

“What?” Dan said. “Why not?”

“I have…appreciated my visit with Marie. But it’s time for it to be done.”

“You can’t be serious. It’s your wife: she can be yours, again.”

“I understand what’s on offer.”

“Then how can you turn it down?”

“It’s—I think I prefer to meet up with her in my own time.”

“But—”

“You want to stay here. I get it.”

“You could help him,” Dan said.

“He’ll have to make do without me.”

“You would be helping me.”

“I thought you already had everything you wanted.”

“It’s the Fisherman,” Dan said. “What I’m giving him may not be enough. He might have to conserve his energy. If he does, I could lose Sophie and the boys. I can’t do that, Abe, not again. The first time almost killed me. A second would be too much. If you joined with us—”

I glanced at the Fisherman, held fast beside us. With his skin bleached and worn by brine, his scraggle of a beard a-crawl with something like sand lice, his robes grown part of his body through the hooks that had driven them into him, he looked almost a natural formation, himself. His white eyes stared at the colossal form to which he was connected with such intensity, it was no trouble believing that all his being was bent to his struggle with it. It was hard to credit him having spoken to Dan, at all, even drops of information dripped out over a course of days. Easier to imagine him absorbed by the black water smashing against the flanks of the beast he’d snared.

Those pale eyes swung a second, longer glance in my direction, bringing with them the weight of the Fisherman’s full attention. Most everyone, I suppose, has felt the gaze of someone whose burden of experience renders their regard a tangible thing. What poured from the Fisherman’s eyes drove me back a step, would have forced me to my knees had he not returned it to the scene before him. It was threaded with currents of emotion so powerful they were visible. There was rage, a short man in a dirty tunic and pants gripping his sword two-handed and swinging it down onto the back of a tall woman with long brown hair as she bent over the bodies of her children. There was pain, that same woman and children lying mutilated in wide pools of blood. There was hope, a suggestive passage in what might have been Greek, beneath a woodcut of a fanciful sea-serpent, sporting amidst stylized waves. There was determination, a knock on yet another door to ask yet another old man or woman if they were in possession of certain books. The emotions flowed into a current whose name I couldn’t give; if pressed, I would have said something like want, a gap or crack through the very core of the man. It was what had sustained this man when he had been dragged into the black ocean by one of the ropes he had employed in catching what he’d once glimpsed in a book. It had allowed him to struggle against the great beast, to reach through this underplace to a place that lay deeper still, and to draw on what he found there until he could begin to bring the monster that had broken free of his control once more under his sway. It had permitted him to rope himself to this rock as ballast to hold the beast. Sudden and overwhelming, the impression swept over me that the figure I was seeing was only part of the Fisherman, and a fairly small one, at that. The greater portion of him, I understood, was out of view, a giant with the marble skin and blank eyes of a classical sculpture. The apprehension was terrifying, made more so by the other emotions that impressed themselves on me: an amusement bitter as lemon, and a malice keen as the edge of a razor.

Someone was talking—Dan, continuing to plead his case. Without another word to him, I turned and started back the way that had brought me here. I managed half a dozen steps before Dan caught my shoulder and spun me around. His face was scarlet, the scar descending its right side bone white. He was shouting, spittle flying from his lips. “What the fuck, Abe? What the fuck? You’re going to leave? You’re going to abandon me? What about Sophie? What about Jonas and Jason? Are you thinking of us? Are you thinking of Marie? What about Marie, Abe? What about her?” Behind him, Marie maintained her vigil of the beast.

“Dan,” I said. “Stop. It’s too much. He’s—”

“He’s what?” Dan punctuated his question with a shove from his big hands that had the force of his long legs behind it. It sent me stumbling over the smooth, rounded stones. My foot slipped, and my balance went. I twisted as I fell, trying to catch myself, but all that accomplished was to bring me down on my right side. My arm, my ribs, my hip smashed into the waiting rocks; the pain forced the air from my lungs. Through some miracle, my head escaped colliding with a stone, and when I saw Dan bending towards me, my first thought was,
He’s helping me
. But he wasn’t close enough to offer me a hand, and he straightened almost immediately. Not until I saw the large, bluish rock his fingers stretched around did I understand what he was doing. “I don’t want to do this,” he said, “I really don’t. It’s—if he has your strength, then he won’t have to take them away from me. I—if there were any other way, Abe. Honestly. I don’t want to do this.”

“Then don’t,” I managed, already aware that my words hadn’t registered, because Dan was raising the stone, his body tensing as he made ready to lunge into a blow. That the man I counted my closest friend was about to inflict grievous harm on me, if not kill me outright, was the most monstrous thing I had encountered yet this strange, awful day. A wave of nausea rolled over me. Even as I watched him shift his grip, moving his fingers to one end of his improvised weapon in order to better control it, I half-expected him to pause, lower and allow the rock to fall from his hand, and shake the sense back into his head. Only when Dan was moving forward, swinging the stone towards me, his eyes wide, his lips pressed tightly together, did a surge of adrenaline send me rolling out of his way. His attack missed, the rock cracking on the one that had been under my head and flying from his grasp. My feet tangled with his, sweeping him to the ground but preventing me from rising. Instead, I kicked furiously, pushing away from where he lay stunned. This entire time, I had not forgotten the knife in my pocket, and as I struggled to my feet, I had it out and in hand.

“A knife?” From the tone of Dan’s voice, you would have thought I was the one threatening him. He tried to raise himself on his arms, but he must have injured the left one. It gave out on him, and he barely saved himself from falling on his face. He looked up at me. “It doesn’t matter.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. My heart was pounding, hammering against my chest as if I’d finished a short, fast race. To my left, a stone shifted. A glance in that direction showed one of the boys—I couldn’t tell them apart—toddling towards me. His brother was clambering in my direction from the right; Sophie was waiting a dozen feet behind me. I was about to call out to Dan, mock him for dragging his wife and babies into the dirty deed he was attempting, but something about whichever twin was on my left stilled my tongue. His chubby face, more baby than little boy, was wavering, the mouth stretching wider, splitting his cheeks most of the way to his ears, the blanched gums sprouting rows of serrated fangs that would not have been out of place in the mouth of a shark. His brother’s face had undergone a similar transformation, as had Sophie’s.

Dan had found his way to his feet, though he was rubbing that left arm. He had to have seen the change in Sophie and the boys, but nothing about him acknowledged it. Wincing, he stooped and scooped up a new, reddish rock with his right hand. Rising, he said, “It’s a shame, Abe. I always thought Sophie and you would have gotten along with one another, appreciated each other’s company.”

I licked my lips, which had gone dry. Attempting to keep my eyes on all four figures surrounding me, I said, “This isn’t your wife, Dan. You have to know that.”

“Shut up,” Dan said and, before I could offer a rejoinder, charged.

The last fight worth the name I had been in had occurred the better part of three decades ago. Dan was younger, at a guess stronger, and he was fighting for what he’d convinced himself was his family. He’d learned a little from his first pass at me: he faked a swing at my head with the stone, then whipped his left hand at me in a roundhouse that might have been smoother if he hadn’t injured that arm. It clouted my ear with less force than he intended, leaving me able to jerk my head out of the path of his rock. I slashed the knife right to left across him, felt it drag on his shirt. He hissed, and swept the stone at me in an uppercut that hit me high in the chest. I grunted, and slashed left to right, feeling the knife catch on his skin. Hugging his left arm to the vents I’d cut in his shirt, Dan stumbled back.

My chest was heaving, my temples pounding. “Dan,” I said, “please.” The tip of my knife wavered in front of me, Dan’s blood scarlet on more of the blade than I’d anticipated.

Crouched forward, his own breath coming in pants, Dan said, “You cut me. You son of a bitch.”

This did not seem the appropriate moment to point out that I had done so in response to his effort to crush my skull with the rock he continued to hold. To either side of me, the twins had drawn closer, their pudgy fingers ending in hooked claws. At my back, Sophie was also nearer, similarly changed. I’d cut Dan deeper than I’d intended. Where it pressed against him, his shirt sleeve was wet with blood. Without releasing his grip on the stone, he lowered himself to sitting. “Ow,” he said. “You son of a bitch. You cut me.”

“Sorry,” I said; although I wasn’t, not exactly. A mix of joy and revulsion swirled in my gut: joy that I’d survived Dan’s assault; revulsion at the blood soaking his sleeve. Was there any way to find him some kind of medical care in this place?

Dan didn’t answer me. Blood was dripping from his shirt cuff onto the rocks underneath him. The twins, their toes webbed and clawed, were less than a yard from me. I wasn’t as concerned with turning the knife on them or Sophie, not with their appearances so changed, but I wasn’t sure it would do me any good. Yes, they seemed solid, as much as Marie had earlier, in the forest, but the ease with which their forms shifted made me doubt the efficacy of any weapon I could muster against them. When the boys paused their flanking maneuver, I assumed it was to judge the best moment to strike. I didn’t think I could evade the two of them. I was hoping to hop out of the range of one and deal with his brother; though their wide mouths, crammed with fangs, troubled me far more than had Dan’s stones. Not to mention, as long as I was occupied with one of them, their mother would have the opportunity to move on me from behind.

It was the twin to my right who started towards Dan first. His brother looked at me quizzically, and turned after him. Dan raised his head to them. His skin was white, his eyes glazed—shock I guessed, at the wound I’d dealt him. He grinned sickly at the monsters working their way in his direction. “My boys,” he said. “Come to your papa.” The closer the things drew to him, the more their pale forms shimmered, until by the time they were standing beside Dan, they had resumed the appearance of toddlers, with the exception of their mouths, which retained their shark grins. Beneath Dan, the rocks were slick and red. With a broad tongue the color of liver, the boy on Dan’s right licked his lips. His mouth opened, as if in a yawn, and kept opening, wider and wider, his notched teeth ringing a gullet studded with clusters of additional fangs. His attention returned to the blood trickling from him, Dan didn’t notice the boy’s head pivoting in his direction, the better to deliver a massive bite to his shoulder. To his left, the other twin was spreading his jaws, readying his strike. I went to speak, to call out a warning to him, but Sophie shoved me aside and strode past me. Her mouth was likewise open, the full set of her teeth on display.

What must Dan have thought, watching the creature he had called his late wife’s name advance towards him, the lower portion of her face a stark refutation of the identity he’d tried to confer on her? Something was happening to Sophie, to the boys, another change rippling over them. Their flesh blackened as if burned, cracking and crumbling, showing charred muscle in some places, burnt bone in others. The odor of charcoaled meat filled the air. An expression of unutterable sadness dragged Dan’s features down. As if to ward off what Sophie had become, he held up his right hand, and the boy to his right snapped his jaws shut on Dan’s shoulder. At almost the same moment, the boy on Dan’s left clamped onto his chest. Dan’s head jerked up, his eyes starting, his arms flying out to either side of him, his back rigid, as if he’d been struck by lightning. His mouth worked to release some sound, a scream or a curse, but Sophie swallowed it in the terrible kiss she lowered on him. As her jaws closed around his face, what sounded like a frantic humming rose from deep in his chest; while his legs spasmed underneath him, as if he were trying to stand. The trio that had him in their teeth kept him in place. Without surrendering her hold on him, Sophie pressed Dan’s arms down.