Authors: John Langan
His family’s attack on him could not have lasted more than a couple of seconds, yet it seemed as if I had been standing watching the three of them savage Dan for hours. So much useless, bloody metal, the knife hung in my hand. Somewhere in the recesses of my brain, a voice was shouting at me to do something; it hadn’t been that long; though hurt, Dan might be savable; even if he weren’t, no one deserved to die like this, devoured alive. My eyes focused on the knife and shifted to Sophie. Her spine was visible at a couple of points through her burned flesh. If I stabbed the knife icepick-fashion on the back of her neck, that might be sufficient to cause her to release Dan. I switched my grip on the handle.
Whichever boy had bitten into Dan’s shoulder pulled his mouth from it and leveled his metallic gaze at me. His face was a patchwork of cinder and ash, his lips and chin splashed scarlet, his teeth hung with shreds of meat. Dan shuddered; his right arm lifted, the hand cupped, and swept in to his chest, as if beckoning me to approach. The boy stared at me with eyes in whose depthless shine I saw all the intelligence of a trout, or pike.
Before I fully understood what I was doing, I bolted. As fast as my feet could pick a path across the stones, I fled that place, ran from Dan and the family he had literally imagined for himself, from Marie looking out across the waves, from the Fisherman engaged in his titanic contest, from the unimaginable creature with which he contested, from the black ocean roaring to the horizon. I made no attempt to retrace the route that had brought me here; instead, I headed straight for the Vivid Trees lining the top of the beach. Loose rocks rattled and snapped as my boots landed on them. I slipped and slid from side to side like someone trying ice skates for the first time. Point down, the knife was in my hand. Stones skipped and rolled away, kicked free by my boots. Beyond the clatter of my passage, I could hear nothing except the breath rushing in and out of my mouth and the waves foaming on the shore. Sophie and the twins—Marie, her bloodlust aroused—any of the pale creatures stationing the beach could be pacing me, waiting for the misstep that would allow them to share Dan’s fate with me.
At the head of the beach, calves and thighs burning from my sprint up the sandy margin, I stopped, bent over, chest heaving. A survey of the path I’d run showed no one following me, no one close, at all. Where Dan had been were several smaller shapes, islands in the crimson pool surrounding them. I could distinguish the forms of Sophie and the twins next to the carnage; although their features were difficult to pick out in any detail. Only their eyes were clearly visible, flashing across the distance, and that because they were watching me. All of the white things were. To a one, they had turned in my direction. Dozens, scores of gold eyes regarded me. In the midst of the heaving ocean beyond them, a tremor passed along the great beast held there. The earth rumbled under my feet. The tremor concentrated at the fissure above the waves in which the end of the Fisherman’s line was embedded. The split trembled, and widened, top and bottom retracting to reveal a gold expanse whose center was bisected by a black ellipse. An eye the size of a stadium cast its gaze out over the scene in front of it.
If the Fisherman’s regard had buffeted me like a strong wind, this creature’s attention howled over me with hurricane force. There was no emotion in it. What streamed from the enormous eye was either so deep below or so high above any discrete sentiment as to be unrecognizable as such. There was only absence, a void as big and grand as everything. It wasn’t white, or black; it wasn’t anything. Perfect in its nothingness, its nullity, it had been contravened, somehow, sundered, confined to the form before me. Imprisoned, but not separated, it was the black ocean, and the pale creatures grasping the lines that held it, and the Fisherman tied to his rock, and me. To understand this, to appreciate it, might be the beginning of a kind of wisdom.
It was not a wisdom I had any desire for. The great beast’s awareness saturating the very air, I ran into the woods. The trees grew more closely together, here, their leaf-crowns closer to the ground, the outermost branches weaving around one another. My arms brushed an especially low-hanging limb, and what felt like a dozen razor blades parted the sleeves of my raincoat and shirt, and the skin they covered, in as many places. I sucked in my breath, stumbling as the pain flared up my arm, but although the fingers of my other hand came away bloody from their exploration of my injuries, I did not slow my flight. Tiny white cracks had begun to open in my surroundings, the trees, the leaves, the ground, all of it, as if I were running through a very old painting whose surface had dried out. I struggled not to glance down, afraid I would see myself fracturing, too.
Horror so pure it arrested any thought more elaborate than
Run
, filled me. For that reason, though I saw the ground ahead fall away, heard the sound of moving water, I continued forward without pause, until I had raced over the top of the bank and was half-sliding, half-falling down it into the galloping stream below.
Warm water embraced me, tumbling me end over end. I seemed to pass a long time submerged in depths shot through with black currents. Dark shapes darted around me. I kicked my legs, pulled my arms, attempting to right myself. White cracks split the water. I pulled my arms and kicked my legs. All at once, the stream caught hold of me and whisked me forward. Lungs at the point of bursting, I pushed for the surface and broke through. Spitting out brackish water, I inhaled lungfuls of air. Already, my boots had filled with water and were dragging me back under. I slid my legs against one another and forced the right boot off. The other held tight, until I ducked my head beneath the waves so I could grab the boot and twist it off.
Feet unencumbered, it was easier for me to keep my head above water, which was good, because the stream slid into heavy rapids. Gray boulders rose amidst the churning foam, signposting the underwater labyrinth through which the stream was racing. A low slab of stone loomed in my path; I breast-stroked around it, skimming the tops of a cluster of rocks that smacked my knees and shins. The current took me between the halves of a massive, split boulder, and dumped me over a short waterfall onto a pile of stones close enough to the water’s surface for it to offer no cushion. Something cracked in my chest. I grasped at the stones below me, but they were too slippery, the current too strong. A rock like the finger of a giant thrust out of the water ahead of me. I threw my arm over my head. The impact shocked through me. The stream rolled me off the stone and spun me into a wide pool. Below me, clouds of sediment billowed in the water’s depths. I was finding it difficult to keep above them: my clothes were waterlogged, and my body seemed to consist of more bruises, breaks, and cuts than it did muscles to propel me to the edge of this quieter patch. To be sure, I was exhausted, but the image of that great eye unlocking, of Dan’s fate on the beach, offered sufficient incentive for me to force my limbs into an approximation of the dog-paddle.
I didn’t see the figure that swam up out of the murk below, wasn’t aware of anything until the hand seized my ankle and yanked me under. In the time it took me to realize what had happened, I was dragged to the edge of the churning sediment. I knew it must be one of the pale creatures, possibly Sophie, finishing what had begun on the beach. My knife was long gone, lost at some point during my flight. I kicked at the thing with my free foot, but even panicked, I had little strength left me. Releasing my leg, the creature caught my belt and hauled me down until we were floating face-to-face.
Her hair fluttering in the current, Marie regarded me with her shining eyes. My surprise was succeeded by resignation.
Of course,
I thought.
Sophie takes care of Dan, and Marie sees to me.
I could almost appreciate the symmetry. I hoped that she would simply keep me here until I had no choice but to inhale the stream; after the initial unpleasantness, I had heard, drowning was supposed to be a peaceful way to die—unlike being torn apart by mouths jammed with fangs. Marie caught my shoulders, and pushed me deeper, down into the sediment cloud.
Immediately, I lost sight of her, of everything but the murk tumbling about me. Bubbles leaked from my lips. Whatever acceptance I’d imagined I’d felt departed, swept aside by a desire to escape that had me twisting in Marie’s grasp, striking her arms with my fists. All at once, her hands were gone, and I swam for the surface with my lungs searing, my arms and legs full of lead. I emerged near a shore fronted by trees I recognized, hemlock and birch, maple. Screaming with the effort, I paddled until the water grew shallow. I crawled out of the water onto dry land, where I collapsed, coughing up the water that had found its way into my lungs. Spent, shivering, I surrendered to the blackness that rose around me in a tide.
VI
Hundred-Year Flood
A pair of high school kids, who claimed they were out on a hike, but who I suspect were searching for a secluded spot to experiment with illicit substances of one form or another, found me washed up on the south shore of Dutchman’s Creek, almost to the Hudson. My clothes were shredded, my body scraped, battered, and cut, and I was running a fever high enough to induce hallucinations, which was what the doctors, nurses, and police detectives who attended me made of my more fantastical claims. The doctors and nurses were present because I was in Wiltwyck Hospital, being treated for the infection that was causing my temperature to spike and was proving stubbornly resistant to a range of increasingly powerful antibiotics. The detectives drifted in and out of my room because, in my delirium, I ranted about Dan’s death. There was little trouble tracing my movements: the cops checked with Howard, who verified that I’d been in for breakfast with another fellow, tall, with red hair and a scar all the way up the right-hand side of his face. The two of us had been bound for Dutchman’s Creek, Howard said, though he’d advised against it. (I don’t know for sure, but I doubt he shared Lottie Schmidt’s long, strange tale with them.) After a brief search, the detectives came across my tacklebox on the stone ledge where I’d caught what Marie had called a nymph; of course, the fish and my rod were nowhere to be found. Downstream a ways, the police located Dan’s gear, which apparently had been washed there by the flooded creek. Of Dan himself, there was no trace, and this, together with the wounds on my arm, which seemed to have been inflicted with a knife or similar weapon, raised their suspicions as to what, exactly, had transpired during our fishing trip.
I didn’t help matters any by ranting about Dan’s attempt to club me with a rock so he could feed my essence to a centuries-old magician, or his death at the teeth of his dead wife and children. It sounded mad, yes, but combined with Dan’s apparent disappearance and the cuts on me, the scenario I was narrating seemed as if it might be describing the substance, if not the exact details, of an actual event. I was under suspicion; though what friends and co-workers the detectives interviewed spoke well of me; nor did Dan’s friends or family voice any reservations about our fishing trips. Had the remains of Dan’s body turned up, I’m not certain what effect they would have had on the cops. I want to say they would have exonerated me beyond a shadow of a doubt, but the same evidence can lead to diametrically opposed conclusions, depending on who’s reviewing it. Of Dan, however, there remained no sign, despite a widening of the search area to include the stretch of the Hudson south of where Dutchman’s Creek empties into it. In the end, Dan would be declared officially missing, and a few of his cousins from up around Phoenicia would drive down to see to the disposition of his goods, the selling of his and Sophie’s house.
The police, though, did not let go of questioning me that easily. I suppose it is fortunate for them that I was stuck in a hospital bed, taking one step forward, two back in my contest with an infection whose diagnosis changed every few days. I could have requested a lawyer, and had I been in more of my right mind at the outset, I might have. By the time this occurred to me, the detectives had pretty much lost interest in me as anything other than the fellow victim of a fishing mishap that had almost certainly claimed my buddy’s life. At some point when my sickness was still causing me to see Dan, Sophie, and the twins silhouetted on the curtain that hung around my bed, I realized that neither of the men who continued to ask me what had happened the morning Dan and I went fishing would—or could—believe what I was telling them. In my fever, it was an insight I resisted, but eventually, I began crafting a story that sounded like something they would, and could, accept. I sometimes wondered if they were aware of my ploy, but if so, they let slip no sign of it. Maybe they were grateful for what I was doing, fashioning them a story that would account for most of the details they had to reckon with.
Much of my narrative of that morning, I left unchanged. As my pa used to say, If you have to concoct a lie, be sure to mix in as much of the truth as you can. I told the police about picking up Dan at his place in the pre-dawn hours, about stopping off at Herman’s Diner for breakfast, about the story Howard recounted to us after we informed him of our destination. Of course I didn’t believe Howard’s tale, I said, but it seemed to work to powerful effect on Dan, so that by the time we were at Dutchman’s Creek and fishing, he admitted that his reason for selecting this spot was what he took to be a hint from his grandfather’s fishing journal that he might meet his dead wife and children here. Didn’t I think this was, well, crazy? one of the cops asked. Yes, I said, but we were already at the creek. All I could do was try to reason with Dan, and when that failed and he set off to find his family upstream, follow him. The creek was in flood, the shore slippery; a couple of times, I almost fell in. Dan refused to wait for me. I lost my balance one time too many, and went into the stream. Right away, I struck my head on a rock, and that was about as far as my memories went. Frankly, I was surprised to be among the living. Did I have any guess as to what might’ve happened to Dan? the detectives asked. I did not. I had fallen into Dutchman’s Creek, but I had a few years on Dan. All I could say was, the last I’d seen of him, he was walking upstream.