Stories: All-New Tales

Michael Swanwick. GOBLIN LAKE

IN 1646, SHORTLY BEFORE THE END of the Thirty Years’ War, a patrol of Hessian cavalrymen, fleeing the aftermath of a disastrous battle to the north wherein a botched flanking maneuver had in an hour turned certain victory to abject rout, made camp at the foot of what a local peasant they had captured and forced to serve as a guide assured them was one of the highest mountains in the Spessart region of Germany. Among their number was a young officer named Johann von Grimmelshausen, a firebrand and habitual liar who was known to his comrades as Jurgen, which in English translates as Jack.

As the front lines were distant and the countryside unwary, the patrol had picked up a great deal of food and several casks of Rhine wine on their way. So that night they ate and drank well. When the food was done, they called upon their guide to tell them of the countryside in which they found themselves. He, having slowly come to the opinion that they did not intend to kill him when they were done with his services (and, possibly, having plans of lulling them with his servility and then slipping away under cover of darkness when they were all asleep), was only too happy to oblige them.

“Directly below us, not a quarter of a mile’s distance away, is the Mummelsee”-in the local dialect the name meant Goblin Lake-“which is bottomless, and which has the peculiar property that it changes whatever is thrown into it into something else. So that, for example, if any man were to tie up a number of pebbles in a kerchief and let it down into the water on a string, when he pulled it up the pebbles would have turned into peas or rubies or the eggs of vipers. Furthermore, if there were an odd number of pebbles, the number of whatever they became should invariably be even, but if they were even they would come out odd.”

“That would be a very pretty way of making a living,” Jack observed. “Sitting by the banks of a lake, turning pebbles into rubies.”

“What they become is not predictable,” the peasant cautioned. “You could not rely on them turning to gemstones.”

“Even if they did so only one time in a hundred…Well, I have spent many a day fishing with less to show for it.”

By now, several of the cavalry men were leaning forward, listening intently. Even those who stared loftily way into the distance, as if they did not care, refrained from speaking lest they miss something profitable. So, seeing too late that he had excited their avarice, the peasant quickly said, “But it is a very dangerous place! This was the very lake which Luther said was cursed and that if you threw a stone into it a terrible storm immediately blows up, with hail and lightning and great winds, for there are devils chained up in its depths.”

“No, that was in Poltersberg,” Jack said negligently.

“Poltersberg!” the peasant spat. “What does Poltersberg know of terrors? There was a farmer hereabout who had to kill his best plow horse when it broke a leg. Being of an inquiring turn of mind, he hauled its carcass to the lake and threw it in. Down it sank, and up it rose again, alive-but transformed horribly, so that it had teeth like knives, two legs rather than four, and wings like those of an enormous bat. It screamed in agony and flew away into the night, no man knows where.

“Worse, when the carcass hit the water, some of it was splashed over the farmer’s face, erasing his eyes completely, so that from that instant onward, he was blind.”

“How did he know the horse was transformed, then?” Jack asked with a sardonic little smile.

The peasant’s mouth opened and then closed again. After a bit, he said, “It is also said that there were two cutthroats who brought the body of a woman they had-”

Jack cut him off. “Why listen to your stories when we can find out for ourselves?”

There was a general murmur of agreement and, after a little prodding with a knife, the peasant led them all downward.

The way down to the Mummelsee was steep and roadless, and the disposition of the soldiers was considerably soured by the time they reached it. Their grumblings, moreover, were directed as much toward Jack as toward the rascally peasant guide, for on reflection it was clear to them all that he had insisted on this journey not from any real belief that he would end up rich-for what experienced military man believes that? — but from his innate love of mischief.

Oblivious to their mood, Jack sauntered to the end of a crumbling stone pier. He had brought along a double handful of fresh cherries, which he carried in his cap, and was eating them one by one and spitting their stones into the water. “What is that out there?” he asked, gesturing negligently toward what appeared to be a large, submerged rock, roughly rectangular in shape and canted downward to one side. It was easily visible, for the moon was full and unobscured and its light seemed to render the nighttime bright as day.

“In my grandfather’s time,” the peasant said eagerly, as if anxious to restore his good reputation, “the Duke of Württemberg caused a raft to be made and put out onto the lake to sound its depths. But after the measure had been led down nine thread cables with a sinking lead and yet had found no bottom-why, then the raft, contrary to the nature of wood, began to sink. So that all made haste for the land, fearing greatly. Nor did any escape without a soaking, and terrible diseases were said to have afflicted them in their old age.”

“So that’s the raft, you say?”

“If you look closely, you can see where the arms of Württemberg were carved into the wood. Worn, perhaps, but clear to see.” The peasant pointed earnestly at some faint markings that a credulous man might convince himself were as described.

Jack rounded on him savagely. “You scoundrel! I have been watching the cherry stones as they sank in the water, and nothing happened to them. One did not become two, two were not transformed into seventeen, and none of them-not a one! — showed the least tendency to become rubies or emeralds or vipers or oxen or even fish.”

Protesting wildly, the peasant tried to scuttle around Jack and so off the pier. Jack, for his part, was equally determined not to allow him to do so. Thus it was that a game of rat-and-mastiff took place, with the peasant playing the part of the rat and the cavalrymen the mastiffs. And though the numbers were all on one side, all the desperation and cunning were on the other.

At the last, Jack made a lunge for the peasant and, just as the man escaped his enclosing arms, found himself seized by two of his laughing comrades, hoisted up into the air, and thrown into the Mummelsee.

DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, JACK sank, choking. The water was as clear as crystal, and yet far down in the distance as black as coal, for the monstrousness of its depth. So filled with anger at his comrades was he that at first he did not notice when he stopped choking. Then, before he could properly marvel at this strange turn of circumstance, he was suddenly distracted by movements in the depths of the lake. At a distance, the creatures looked like so many frogs, flitting to and fro, but as they grew closer they seemed very much like human beings, save that their skin was green and their clothes, though fine and flowing, were clearly woven of seaweeds and other underwater plants.

More and more of these water spirits rose up like diving birds and quickly surrounded Jack. So great was their number that he had no choice but to go with them when, by gestures and frowns, the sylphs indicated he was to descend to the very bottom of the Mummelsee. Like a flock of birds circling as they descend from the sky, they guided him down.

When finally Jack lightly touched one foot to the floor of the lake, pushing up a gentle puff of silt, and then with the other creating a second puff, he found there waiting for him a sylph or nix (for the taxonomy of lake spirits was not a subject he was conversant in) clad in raiment of gold and silver, by which token he took this being to be the king of the Mummelsee.

“A good day to you, Jack,” said the king. “I trust you are well?”

“God save us from hurt and harm, friend!” Jack cried. “But however could you possibly know my name?”

“As for that, my dear fellow, I have been reading about your adventures, most recently with those scoundrelly false comrades who threw you into this lake.” The king’s Vandyke and mustachios waved lightly in the water and this made Jack clutch his throat in sudden apprehension that he was breathing a medium for which mortal men were unsuited. But then the king laughed and his laugh was so natural and warmhearted that Jack could not help but join it. So, realizing that a man who could still laugh was neither dead nor in any sense lacking breath, he put aside his fears.

“What place is this,” Jack asked, “and what manner of people live here?”

“Why, as the saying goes, ‘As above, so below.’ We have our farms and cities and churches, though the god we worship in it may not have the same name as yours. Salt hay is harvested to thatch our roofs. Sea horses pull plows in our fields, and sea cows are milked in our barns. Catfish chase mice fish, and water gnomes drive shafts through the muck in search of mussels and precious stones. The maidens here may have scales, but they are no less beautiful nor any more slippery than those in your above-water world.”

So talking, the king of the Mummelsee led Jack along a pleasant road to what destination he did not yet reveal, and all the nixies who had guided Jack down formed themselves into a casual procession behind them, laughing and talking among themselves, and flashing from side to side as they went, so that they resembled nothing so much as a great school of minnows. Above a winding road they swam and then through a forest of giant kelp, which abruptly opened up upon a shining white city.

Great were the wonders of that submarine metropolis. The walls of its buildings were so white they glowed, for they were plastered (so explained the king) with powdered pearls. While the streets were not paved with gemstones, many a fresco set into the exterior walls was made of nothing else, and the scenes they depicted were not of warfare but of children at play and lovers chastely courting. The architecture was a happy blend of Moorish and Asian influences, with minarets and pagodas existing in easy harmony, and entrances on all the upper floors as well as the bottommost. Nor did it escape Jack’s attention that there were neither locks on the doors nor guards at the entrances to the palace-and this was far from the least of the wonders that he saw.

But the greatest wonder of all, so far as Jack was concerned, was the sylph maiden Poseidonia, the king’s daughter, who came out to greet her father on his return to the city. The instant he clapped eyes on her slim and perfect form, Jack was determined to win her. Nor was that a difficult task, as he was a well-made man with a soldier’s straight bearing, and his frank admiration drew from her a happy blush and no protests whatsoever. Further, the mer-people being a Heathen folk and not bound by Christian standards of propriety, their mutual infatuation quickly found physical expression.

Time went by. It may have been days or it may have been months.

Late one afternoon, lying in the princess’s bed, with the sheets and pillows all in sensuous disarray and a greenish-blue noontide light flowing through her bedroom windows, Jack cleared his throat and hesitantly said, “Tell me something, oh my best and belovedest.”

“Anything!” replied that passionate young sylph.

“One thing continues to bother me-a small thing, perhaps, but it nitters and natters at the back of my mind, and I cannot rid myself of it, however I try. When first I arrived in this rich and splendid land, your father told me he had been reading of my adventures. By what magic? In what unimaginable book?”

“Why, in this one, dearest of scoundrels.” (It was the sylph’s single most endearing quality that she loved Jack for exactly what he was and not one whit through any misapprehension of his character.) “What other book could it possibly be?”

Jack looked from one end of the room to the other, and replied, “I see no book.”

“Well, of course not, silly. If it were here, how could you be in it?”

“I cannot say, oh delight of my eyes, for your answer makes absolutely no sense to me.”

“Trust me, he read of you in this book, nor have you ever left it.”

Now Jack began to feel the stirrings of anger. “This one you say-which one? The devil take me if I can make heads or tales of your answers!”

Then the laughter died in Poseidonia’s throat, and she exclaimed, “You poor thing! You truly do not understand, do you?”

“If I understood, would I be at this very instant begging you like a fool for a simple and straightforward answer?”

She regarded him with a sad little smile. “I think it is time you talked with my father,” she said at last.

“IS MY LISSOME YOUNG daughter not energetic enough to please you?” asked the king of the Mummelsee.

“That and more,” said Jack, who had long grown used to the sylphs’ shockingly direct manner of speaking.

“Then be content with her and this carefree existence you lead, and do not seek to go questing out beyond the confines of these ever-so-pleasant pages.”

“Again you speak in riddles! Majesty, this business is driving me mad.

I beg of you, for this once, speak to me plain and simply, even as if I were but a child.”

The king sighed. “You know what books are?”

“Yes, of course.”

“When was the last time you read one?”

“Why, I-”

“Exactly. Or that anybody you know read one?”

“I have been in the company of rough-and-tumble soldiers, whose response to coming upon a library might typically be to use its contents to start their campfires, so this is not terribly surprising.”

“You must have read books in your youth. Can you tell me the plot of any of them?”

Jack fell silent.

“You see? Characters in books do not read books. Oh, they snap them shut when somebody enters the room, or fling them aside in disgust at what they fancy is said within, or hide their faces in one which they pretend to peruse while somebody else lectures them on matters they’d rather not confront. But they do not read them. Twould be recursive, rendering each book effectively infinite, so that no single one might be finished without reading them all. This is the infallible method of discovering on which side of the page you lie-have you read a book this year?” The king arched an eyebrow and waited.

After a very long silence, Jack said, “No. I have not.”

“Then there you are.”

“But…how can this be? How can we possibly…?”

“It is the simplest thing imaginable,” replied the king. “I, for example, dwell within chapters eleven through seventeen of book five of something called Simplicissimus. It is, I assure you, a good life. So what if the walls of my palace are as thin as paper, the windows simply drawn on by pen, and my actions circumscribed by the whimsy of the artist? I neither age nor die, and when you, taking a brief rest from your romantic gymnastics with my daughter, care to visit me, I always find our little conversations diverting.”

Glumly, Jack stared out through a window paned with nacre polished so smooth as to be transparent. “It is a hard thing,” he said, “to realize that one is not actually real.” Then, after a long moment’s thought, “But this makes no sense. Granted that my current surroundings and condition are hardly to be improved upon. Yet I have seen things in the war that…Well, it doesn’t bears thinking upon. Who on earth would create such a world as ours? Who could possibly find amusement in such cruelties as, I grant you, I have sometimes been a part of?”

“Sir,” said the king, “I am not the artist, and he, I suspect, is nobody of any great esteem in his unimaginably larger world. He might pass you on the street unnoticed. In conversation, it is entirely possible, he would not impress you favorably. Why, then, should you expect more from him than he-or, as it may be, she-might reasonably expect from his or her vastly more potent creator?”

“Are you saying that our author’s world is no better than our own?”

“It is possible it is worse. From his work we can infer certain things about the world in which he lives. Our architecture is ornate and romantic. His therefore is plain and dull-sheets of gray concrete, perhaps, with each window the exact twin of all the others-or he would not have bothered to imagine ours in such delightful detail.”

“Then, since our world is so crude and violent, it stands to reason that his must be a paragon of peace and gentility?”

“Say rather that ours has an earthy vigor while his is mired down in easy hypocrisy.”

Shaking his head slowly, Jack said, “How is it that you know so much about the world we live in, and yet I know so little?”

“There are two types of characters, my son. Yours is forever sailing out of windows with his trousers in his hand, impersonating foreign dignitaries with an eye to defrauding uncharitable bishops, being ambushed in lightless alleys by knife-wielding ruffians, and coming home early to discover his newlywed bride in bed with his mistress’s husband.”

“It is as if you had been reading my diary,” Jack said wonderingly. “Had I a diary to read.”

“That is because you are the active sort of character, whose chief purpose is to move the plot along. I am, however, more the reflective sort of character, whose purpose it is to expound upon and thus reveal the inner meaning of the narrative. But I see you are confused-let us step briefly out of my story.”

And, as simply as one might turn a page, Jack found himself standing in a pleasant garden, awash in the golden light of a late-afternoon sun. The king of the Mummelsee was seated in a chair which, though plain and simple, suggested a throne-indeed, such a throne as a philosopher-king might inhabit.

“That is very well observed of you,” the king said in response to Jack’s unspoken observation. “It is possible that, with encouragement, you could be converted to a reflective character yet.”

“Where are we?”

“This is my dear friend Dr. Vandermast’s garden in Zayana, where it is eternally afternoon. Here, he and I have had many a long discussion of entelechy and epistemology and other such unimportant and ephemeral nothings. The good doctor has discreetly made himself absent that we may talk in private. He himself resides in a book called-but what matters that? This is one of those magical places where we may with equanimity discuss the nature of the world. Indeed, its aspect is such that we could scarce do otherwise if we tried.”

A hummingbird abruptly appeared before Jack, hanging in the air like a frantic feathered jewel. He extended a finger and the bird hovered just above it, so that he could feel the delicate push of air from its madly pumping wings upon his skin. “What marvel is this?” he asked.

“It is just my daughter. Though she does not appear in this scene, still she desires to make her wishes known-and so she expresses herself in imagery. Thank you, dear, you may leave now.” The king clapped his hands and the hummingbird vanished. “She will be heartbroken if you depart from our fictive realm. But doubtless another hero will come along and, being fictional, Poseidonia neither learns from her experiences nor lets them embitter her against their perpetrator’s gender. She will greet him as openly and enthusiastically as she did you.”

Jack felt a perfectly understandable twinge of jealousy. But he set it aside. Hewing to the gist of the discussion, he said, “Is this an academic argument, sir? Or is there a practical side to it?”

“Dr. Vandermast’s garden is not like other places. If you were to wish to leave our world entirely, then I have no doubt it could be easily arranged.”

“Could I then come back?”

“Alas, no,” the king said regretfully. “One miracle is enough for any life. And more than either of us, strictly speaking, deserves, I might add.”

Jack picked up a stick and strode back and forth along the flower beds, lashing at the heads of the taller blossoms. “Must I then decide based on no information at all? Leap blindly into the abyss or remain doubtful at its lip forever? This is, as you say, a delightful existence. But can I be content with this life, knowing there is another and yet being ignorant of what it might entail?”

“Calm yourself. If that is all it takes, then let us see what the alternative might be.” The king of the Mummelsee reached down into his lap and turned the page of a leather-bound folio that Jack had not noticed before.

“ARE YOU GOING TO be sitting there forever, woolgathering, when there are chores to be done? I swear, you must be the single laziest man in the world.”

Jack’s fat wife came out of the kitchen, absently scratching her behind. Gretchen’s face was round where once it had been slender, and there was a slight hitch in her gait, where formerly her every movement had been a dance to music only she could hear. Yet Jack’s heart softened within him at the sight of her, as it always did.

He put down his goose quill and sprinkled sand over what he had written so far. “You are doubtless right, my dear,” he said mildly. “You always are.”

As he was stumping outdoors to chop wood, draw water, and feed the hog they were fattening for Fastnacht, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror that hung by the back door. An old and haggard man with a beard so thin it looked moth eaten glared back at him in horror. “Eh, sir,” he murmured to himself, “you are not the fine young soldier who tumbled Gretchen in the hayloft only minutes after meeting her, so many years ago.”

A cold wind blew flecks of ice in his face when he stepped outside, and the sticks in the woodpile were frozen together so that he had to bang them with the blunt end of the axe to separate them so that they might be split. When he went to the well, the ice was so thick that breaking it raised a sweat. Then, after he’d removed the rock from the lid covering the bucket of kitchen slops and started down toward the sty, he slipped on a patch of ice and upended the slops over the front of his clothing. Which meant not only that he would have to wash those clothes weeks ahead of schedule-which in wintertime was an ugly chore-but that he had to gather up the slops from the ground with his bare hands and ladle them back into the bucket, for come what may the pig still needed to be fed.

So, muttering and complaining to himself, old Jack clomped back into the house, where he washed his hands and changed into clean clothing and sat back down to his writing again. After a few minutes, his wife entered the room and exclaimed, “It is so cold in here!” She busied herself building up the fire, though it was so much work carrying wood up to his office that Jack would rather have endured the cold to save himself the extra labor later on. Then she came up behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders. “Are you writing a letter to Wilhelm again?”

“Who else?” Jack growled. “We work our fingers to the bone to send him money, and he never writes! And when he does, his letters are so brief! He spends all his time drinking and running up debts with tailors and chasing after-” He caught himself in time, and coughed. “Chasing after inappropriate young women.”

“Well, after all, when you were his age-”

“When I was his age, I never did any such thing,” Jack said indignantly.

“No, of course not,” he wife said. He could feel the smile he did not turn around to see. “You poor foolish dear.”

She kissed the top of his head.

THE SUN EMERGED FROM behind a cloud as Jack reappeared, and the garden blazed with a hundred bright colors-more of Poseidonia’s influence, Jack supposed. Its flowers turned their heads toward him flirtatiously and opened their blossoms to his gaze.

“Well?” said the king of the Mummelsee. “How was it?”

“I’d lost most of my teeth,” Jack said glumly, “and there was an ache in my side that never went away. My children were grown and moved away, and there was nothing left in my life to look forward to but death.”

“That is not a judgment,” the king said, “but only a catalog of complaints.”

“There was, I must concede, a certain authenticity to life on the other side of the gate. A validity and complexity which ours may be said to lack.”

“Well, there you are, then.”

The shifting light darkened and a wind passed through the trees, making them sigh. “On the other hand, there is a purposefulness to this life which the other does not have.”

“That too is true.”

“Yet if there is a purpose to our existence-and I feel quite certain that there is-I’ll be damned if I know what it is.”

“Why, that is easily enough answered!” the king said. “We exist to amuse the reader.”

“And this reader-who exactly is he?”

“The less said about the reader,” said the king of the Mummelsee fervently, “the better.” He stood. “We have talked enough,” he said. “There are two gates from this garden. One leads back whence we came. The second leads to…the other place. That which you glimpsed just now.”

“Has it a name, this ‘other place’?”

“Some call it Reality, though the aptness of that title is, of course, in dispute.”

Jack tugged at his mustache and chewed at the inside of his cheek. “This is, I swear, no easy choice.”

“Yet we cannot stay in this garden forever, Jack. Sooner or later, you must choose.”

“Indeed, sir, you are right,” Jack said. “I must be resolute.” All about him, the garden waited in hushed stillness. Not a bullfrog disturbed the glassy surface of the lily pond. Not a blade of grass stirred in the meadow. The very air seemed tense with anticipation.

He chose.

So it was that Johann von Grimmelshausen, sometimes known as Jurgen, escaped the narrow and constricting confines of literature, and of the Mummelsee as well, by becoming truly human and thus subject to the whims of history. Which means that he, of course, died centuries ago. Had he remained a fiction, he would still be with us today, though without the richness of experience which you and I endure every day of our lives.

Was he right to make the choice he did? Only God can tell. And if there is no God, why, then we will never know.