The Fisherman

IV. Words Read by Traffic Light

His story done, Howard seemed relieved, as if that burden I’d sensed behind his words at the beginning of his tale had passed from him. I felt oddly disoriented, disconnected from the diner’s chrome and glass, the way you do after you’ve finished a book or movie in which you’ve been absorbed and which hasn’t loosened its hold on you. Dan and I could take what he’d told us or leave it, Howard said, but he’d recommend taking it, and maybe giving Onteora Lake, which was just up the road, a try. With that, he ambled back to the kitchen.

Outside the diner’s windows, rain fell in a wall that gave me the momentary sensation we were at the bottom of the sea. I half-expected to see the shadow of some enormous fish glide past. I shook my head and reached for my wallet. Not until after Dan and I had paid our check, and run through the rain to my truck, and I had turned right out of the diner’s parking lot onto 28, did I say, “What in the hell was all that?”

Dan shook his head. “Crazy.”

“Crazy…” That was one word for it. I was annoyed, the way you are when you aren’t sure if someone’s had you on or not. I know: how could Howard have been doing anything else? Dead people standing up and walking around, black magic, monsters: it was the stuff of a scary movie, a fishing yarn gone feral. I was pretty sure that Dan and I had just had our legs pulled so hard, we’d be tilting to one side. Howard had said he’d wanted to be a writer; I had the strong suspicion he’d just related his first novel to us.

But…while I couldn’t credit the stranger events he’d related, let alone the outright fantastic ones, not once during his story had Howard given me the impression he was lying. Which, I knew, was the hallmark of an accomplished liar. But there was something to his words, some undercurrent, that hinted at a modicum of truth to them, and that irritated me more than anything. He had seemed unhappy with the tale he’d related to us, as if he hadn’t liked its details any more than he expected us to.

All the same, those details. If, as the saying goes, that’s where the devil is, then half of hell seemed to be crowded into this story. I mean, magic symbols carved with kitchen knives? Ropes braided with fishing hooks? Axe blades dipped in a dead man’s blood? The rain eased, the air lightening as the sun struggled to push through the clouds. Not to mention, that business with the painter fellow, Otto, cutting his throat after he saw the woman in black.

Despite myself, I stepped on the brake. What the hell was that I was remembering? Howard hadn’t said anything about a painter, had he? Where was that coming from? I eased into the left-turn lane by the barbecue place. Trying to keep my voice light, I said, “You’re sure you want to fish this place?”

“Are you serious?” Dan said.

I didn’t answer; instead, I steered left onto 28A and headed west, towards the southern edge of the Reservoir. It was a route I’d taken plenty of times, first with Marie when we went for a Sunday drive, then by myself when I was searching for places to fish, then with Dan when I took him to some of those fishing spots. This morning, the road seemed more narrow, its curves harder to navigate my truck around. At every bend, water streamed across it, and the tires shimmied when they hit it. Their branches weighted with the rain, the trees that grew thick by the sides of the road reached down to us. One of the limbs dragged over the roof of the cab, and the metal shrieked.

Get a grip, I told myself. After all, Howard’s wasn’t the only tale I’d heard about what was supposed to lie beneath the Reservoir’s waters. I believe the first must have concerned the towns that had been abandoned to make way for it. I encountered it when I was still at college, during what was likely my first visit to the place. A half-dozen of us had driven up in someone’s station wagon to drink beers and gaze up at the stars. I’d been included because I had a guitar on which I could pick out some of the more popular songs on the radio. While I was taking a break from playing beside the modest fire we’d built, one of the girls who’d made the trip sat down next to me and asked if I knew about the Reservoir. I can’t remember what I said, probably no. It had been built, the girl said, on the spot where a town had stood. The residents were evicted, and their home was flooded. Supposedly, the girl went on, if you rowed out on the water when the weather was calm, and your boat drifted over the town’s location, and you looked down, you would see the top of the church steeple, rising out of the depths below.

To be honest, for a long time, I believed that story, even passed it along, myself, a few times, until another friend set me straight, years later. It’s one of those tales I’ve noticed attaches to spots where water covers the site of human dwelling. There’s something haunting about the image of those houses, those shops, those churches, submerged in darkness, schools of fish darting amongst them, the light a distant glow overhead. It’s as if you’re seeing how time works, or some such.

Now the road climbed, scaling the faces of the hills that overlooked the Reservoir’s southern shore. To our right, the ground dropped, lowering the trees there half-, then all the way, down, leaving us looking out over green crowns poking through the low clouds drifting up the hillside. In the distance, the Reservoir was a reach of gray water framed by mist and mountain, a blank piece of paper available for anyone to write on. And if the story you put there featured a woman whose ruined body left a trail of water behind her as she staggered along in search of her children, and a language that could force you to see the other side of the veil screening this world from another, where the original greatest catch coiled beneath the surface of the ocean, then what?

“So,” I said, the sound of my voice unexpectedly loud, “what did you make of old Howard’s story?”

“I think if that shaggy-dog story had been any hairier,” Dan said, “it would have been a carpet.”

“All the same…”

“All the same what?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. It was strange, was all.”

For an answer, Dan snorted.

The other tale I’d heard about this place concerned an actual ghostly encounter. Not long after my inaugural visit to it, a friend — who was more of an acquaintance — claimed that a guy he’d met down at Pete’s had told him something insane. According to this random stranger, he had been driving home along the eastern end of the Reservoir the previous week when he’d noticed a girl, standing at the side of the road ahead. She was barefoot, wearing a long, white dress. The stranger had rolled up beside her and asked if she needed a ride. Without answering, the girl had opened the door and slid into the passenger’s seat. She had directed the fellow down unfamiliar roads until they’d arrived at a gate set back a ways from the asphalt. Here, the girl had left the car, though not before kissing her driver’s cheek with lips so cold they burned. The next day, when the curious stranger returned to the spot where he’d dropped the girl the previous night, he discovered that the gates through which she’d passed led to a cemetery. As my friendly acquaintance told it, what had leant the stranger’s tale that tiny bit of extra credibility had been the spot on his right cheek where the girl’s kiss had landed. The skin was raw, red, the outline of her lips still visible.

They call this second story The Phantom Hitchhiker, and you find versions of it all over the place — all around the world, I’d bet. That I heard a variation connected to the Reservoir was pure chance. It could as easily have been set any location with no effect to its integrity. Most of the ghost and strange stories I’ve heard are like this, local riffs on a more general theme. If you tried, I suppose you could find a meaning for them, a moral they embody. In the case of the Hitchhiker, I guess it would have to do with being leery of strangers, and there’s probably a caution about desire in there, too, isn’t there? With Howard’s tale, I couldn’t figure out what lesson to draw from it, what message it was trying to convey. What was I supposed to think about, say, the stone those workers had unearthed on the Dort House’s property? Stone? I thought. Howard hadn’t said anything about a stone. What was this? Only, I knew exactly what stone, the large, blue one in whose depths a worker had glimpsed a distant, fiery eye. My foot slacked on the gas.

To our left, one end of a driveway looped towards a sizable house whose fieldstone walls, tall windows, and jagged roofline appeared intended to suggest a fairy castle, a suggestion the no-less-sizable outbuildings gathered near it picked up and reinforced. At the top of the manicured lawn next to it, an Italianate villa brooded over a yard full of statuary. Beside me, Dan was silent, his thoughts his own. I kept on 28A as it descended the hillside, past a boxy church, a pair of semitrailers parked in an improvised lot, and houses whose pretensions skewed middle-class, until the road leveled. I veered left, onto Stone Church Way, away from the Reservoir, and took it till Ashokan Lane branched to the right. I was reasonably sure Howard had mentioned the Sheriff who saw to the Dort House’s eventual destruction, but I was less certain whether he had described that official’s look at the interior. Here, the houses tucked in amidst the trees were more modest than those we’d passed at the top of the hillside, raised ranches, cottages, the occasional farmhouse. The cars in their driveways were not the newest models; their bumper stickers proclaimed their pride in their honor students, their loyalties in the last couple of elections. A mile or so up the road, past a heavy stand of trees, a sign for Tashtego Way marked the opening to a narrow lane on the left. I turned onto it.

Trees grew at the very edge of the road. Their branches and in some cases trunks weighted with rain, they leaned towards one another, forming a tunnel of bark and leaf. Concerned I might clip one of them, I eased off the gas and steered towards the middle of the blacktop. Overhead, the rain clung to the branches and swelled into large drops that dangled and then dropped, striking the roof of the cab with a bang. Dutchman’s Creek was supposed to be somewhere off this road, but as yet, I had not spotted any potential parking spots, only trees walling us in on either side. Briefly, I wondered if the Creek actually existed — if it might not be some kind of local legend — but the trees on the right fell away to reveal a stretch of marsh, a meadow along from it, a low ridge backing both. I braked to a crawl, rolling past the marsh until we came to the meadow. After about ten feet, I turned the wheel slightly, testing the soil with the right-hand tires. The truck had four-wheel drive, so I most likely could have driven straight into the tall grass with full confidence I’d be able to drive out again, but I hated to tear up a stretch of land like that if I didn’t have to. Not to mention, if I was wrong, it would be an expensive proposition to have a tow-truck come all the way out here to extricate me from my error. The ground felt solid enough. I turned the wheel a little more, until the truck was completely in the meadow, with a good five-foot margin between my door and the road. I shifted into park, set the parking brake, and cut the engine.

As if my turning the key had summoned it, the rain fell with renewed force, washing away the view out the windows. Dan sighed and reached for his hat, but I caught his arm. “Let’s wait a minute,” I said. “It won’t last for long like this.”

“All right,” he said.

“Anyway, it’ll give me a chance to ask you something.”

“Oh?” He raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” I said. “Exactly how did you find out about this place?”

He had to have known what my question was going to be. After Howard’s story, what else would I have wanted to know? Yet he jerked his head back, shifted in his seat, and said, “What? I told you, Alf Evers’s book.”

“Bullshit,” I said, not unkindly.

“What do you—”

“I’m guessing if we had a copy of that book, we wouldn’t find a single reference to Dutchman’s Creek in it.” I held up a hand to forestall his protest. “What is it you aren’t telling me?”

“Jesus, Abe,” Dan said. He grabbed his hat, jammed it on his head, and flung open his door with sufficient force to shake the truck. He stepped down into the rain, and reached behind the seat to where we’d stored our gear. I sat where I was while he removed his rod and tacklebox and the knapsack holding our food and drink. Once he had the knapsack shouldered, he glared at me, his face red, and said, “Well? Are you coming?”

There was no way I wasn’t going with him. I opened my door as he slammed his and stormed off across the meadow. I fetched my gear, locked the truck, and set after him. The rain had not let up the way I’d predicted, and the grass and ground were soaked. Water streamed off the bill of my cap, and mud tugged at the boots I was glad I’d worn. By the time I was at the bottom of the ridge, which is to say, not much time, at all, the lower halves of my jeans were wet and heavy. My cap was saturated. The ridge was forested with decent-sized trees, which offered a modicum of shelter. I ducked in among them and continued on my way. It’s funny: although the air was full of the sound of the rain thundering down, and, closer to home, my breathing as I pushed up the slope, I could hear a couple of birds in the branches somewhere nearby, chirping these snippets of song that cut through all the water. It was such a cheering sound, I thought, I’ll have to figure out what bird that is.

The crest of the ridge didn’t take that long to reach. To be honest, it was more a hump in the earth than a proper hill. From its top, I saw Dan starting down the other side, into a valley formed by the low hill we were on and the larger wall of earth and rock behind it. I don’t mind a walk to a fishing spot, but I have to admit, as the years have piled on, I’ve come to like climbing to a location less and less. I feel it in my knees, my problems with which, I guess I inherited from my pa, who was plagued with knee trouble for almost as long as I could remember. I suppose I should have been grateful my knees had held out the length of time they had. Well, in for a penny, and all that; with a sigh, I started my descent.

Just beyond the foot of the first ridge, a ribbon of water crossed the valley. You would have been forgiven for calling it a puddle, except that it was flowing, trickling from left to right through the black, muddy ground. Something — some trick of the light, I judged, the effect of all the trees looming over it, the earth below it — made the water look black as ink. What light there was didn’t skip on its surface; it seemed to float further down in it, as if the rivulet ran far deeper than I knew must be the case. I thought of Howard’s black ocean, and the memory angered me. I was half-tempted to stomp my boot in it, to prove it was no more than the overflow from some nearby pond or stream, but the prospect of my foot touching that black water made my mouth go dry, my heart hammer. “Damn fool,” I muttered, and hopped over it.

My progress up the second ridge was not as quick. The ground was steeper, its surface broken by stretches of rock washed slick by the rain. Caution was the order of the day. Above me, Dan was at the top of the hill. Should I slip, fall, and injure myself, I wasn’t sure he’d hear me calling for help from the other side of it. Tacklebox and rod in one hand, the other free to catch hold of the nearest tree, I started up the ridge, leaning forward to help my balance. The soil was shallow, crisscrossed by exposed tree roots. I stepped carefully, using the roots as footholds. Patches of pale green lichen wrapped the tree trunks, flaking off onto my palms when I grabbed them. I know I was ruminating over Howard’s story, but it had been pushed from the forefront of my thoughts by a vague unease that I attributed to Dan’s behavior, his lying and his outburst. I’d witnessed his difficulties at work; I’d had a much closer view of them this past February, the night he’d come to dinner. I’d told myself that fishing was an oasis for him, a place of respite from the desert of his days. Now, pushing up this steep hill, I wondered if I’d been wrong, if the scorched ruin of his life had swept over his refuge, burying its sweet water under burning sand. I wasn’t afraid of Dan, but I was concerned for him, and for me, chasing him through rows of Hemlock and Maple.

In front of me, a large birch had fallen across the hillside. I half-climbed over it, and saw the remains of a campfire and a pile of empty beer cans. The aftermath of a teenage party, no doubt. The mess grated on me, as such carelessness always did, but mixed in with that sourness was a faint taste of, not relief, exactly, but reassurance. The dented and crushed aluminum, the charred sticks, meant that someone else had been here, and not that long ago, either.

As I drew nearer to the top of the ridge, the Hemlocks grew closer together, and taller, which seemed a good thing, since from the sound of it, the rain was heavier than ever. Feeling somewhat like a mouse in a maze, I picked my way through the trunks, until the ground leveled and I was at the crest of the hill. Because of the trees, there wasn’t much of a view in any direction, but in the distance across from me, I could make out the bulk of another ridge I prayed I wouldn’t have to climb. The surface of this hill already sloped down, at a steeper angle than the one I’d just ascended, but the trees continued dense enough for me to use them and their roots to help my footing. There had better be some Goddamned monster fish in this stream, I thought as I placed my foot between a pair of roots. I was sweating, and the lightweight raincoat of which I was so proud had trapped the moisture within itself, giving me my own portable sauna.

For what felt like much longer than I’m sure it was, I mountain-goated it down the ridge. Not until I was almost at its foot, and the trees were spreading out, allowing me a better view of the torrent of water below me, did I realize that roar I’d been listening to wasn’t the rain, but Dutchman’s Creek. Swollen with the past week’s downpour, the stream galloped over this stretch of rapids in a white rush. Something about the acoustics of the place — the closeness of the ridge on the other side of the creek — caught the water’s noise and amplified it. To the eye, the stream was maybe thirty feet across, not as large as many of the spots I’d fished much further into the Catskills. To the ear, however, Dutchman’s Creek was a river in flood.

At the base of the hill, earth gave way to bare rock, which shelved this side of the stream to left and right. A quick survey showed Dan off to the right, downstream. I sighed. I was straining to be patient with him. I had decided he must have had the name of the place from a woman, one with whom he’d had some measure of involvement. Their affair might have lasted no longer than a single night, but the loss of his family was recent enough for Dan to fear he’d betrayed them. Whatever comfort he’d sought, I didn’t begrudge him. His wounds cut down to the bone — through the bone, to the marrow — and any relief you can find from that kind of pain, however temporary, you take. The trick is, enduring the guilt that grabs you in its broken teeth the minute that comfort ebbs. What came across as a snit, I reminded myself, was symptom of an affliction more profound, one with which I was only too well-acquainted. So although I was tempted to turn left, upstream, in search of solitude to cast my line, I opted to go right.

Even without the addition of seven days’ worth of rain, the rapids I had emerged beside would have been serious business. For a good hundred yards, they descended in a series of drops so regular they might have been enormous steps. This entire portion of the stream was strewn with boulders, gray blocks whose edges the water appeared to have done little to soften. It was as if the side of a mountain had let go and come to rest here. There are fish that will brave such turbulent conditions, and under other, less extreme circumstances, I might have tried my luck for one. I caught a glimpse of a good-sized something sporting in the spray. My ambition, however, is tempered by my common sense, and while every fisherman understands that he’s going to sacrifice his fair share of tackle to his passion, there’s no point in throwing it away, which was what I’d be doing if I cast into this white roaring. Not to mention, between the rain and the spray, the shore was dangerously slick. I continued toward Dan.

When I caught up to him, he had his line in the water. He was standing at the opposite side of a wide pool into which the creek poured itself over a waterfall. Thirty yards across, the pool was a stone cup whose sides fell sharply into the water. Where the stream splashed into it, the pool churned and foamed, cloudy with sediment. Out towards the middle, the water cleared to the point of glass, and despite the raindrops puckering its surface, I picked out the shapes of several large-ish fish congregating there. Trout, I hoped, below whom the water darkened — the dirt and whatnot that had been flung over the waterfall billowing across the pool’s bottom. That I could tell, Dan hadn’t hooked anything, yet. He had positioned himself at the spot where the water exited the pool through a broad channel. His tacklebox was open on the rock next to him, its shelves up and extended, which I took as an indication he planned to stay here a little while. I wasn’t in a hurry to make conversation with him; as long as I could see him, that was fine with me. About halfway round the pool’s circumference, the edge dipped to a ledge that slanted into and under the water. I set down my gear at the top of the incline, bent to open my tacklebox, and in short order was raising my arm to cast.

God, but I love that first cast. You pinch the line to the rod, open the bail, lift the rod over your head, and snap your wrist, releasing the line as you do. The motion whips up the rod, taking the pink and green spinner-bait at the end of the line back and then out, out and out and out, trailing line like a jet speeding ahead of its contrail, climbing to the top of the parabola whose far end is going to put the lure right next to those fish. The reel feeds out more and more line, making a quick, whizzing sound as it spins; while the lure nears the apex of its flight and starts to slow, causing the line to bunch up right behind it. When the lure falls toward the water, it takes longer than it seems it should, so that for a moment, you wonder if it’s already hit the surface and somehow you missed it, and you’re almost to the point of searching for the spot where it went in when the spinner flashes and you look in time to see the water leap up with a plunk. You drop the bail to secure the line, counting, “One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi,” trying to let that little assembly of wood and metal you call your watermelon spinner sink to the level of those fish, watching the line that had fallen slack on the water straighten and submerge, and then it’s four-Mississippi and you start drawing in that line, and the day’s fishing is well and truly underway.

I’ve tried to find something to compare the sensation to, but the closest I’ve ever been able to come is the moment after you’ve swept your fingers down the guitar strings and sounded the opening note of your first song. Or the second after the baseball has slipped your fingertips and is turning in the air as it steaks toward the catcher’s open mitt. There’s a similar feeling of having started something whose outcome you can’t be one-hundred-percent sure of — sometimes, the percentage is significantly lower — but there isn’t the same openness that accompanies the lure’s trajectory. Sure, you think you know what’s waiting for you under the water, but believe you me, you can never be sure what’s going to take your hook.

Right away, the fish I had aimed at were interested in my lure, a couple of them breaking away from the group to dart after it. I wound the handle faster, trying to goad them into striking, but they held back until I had the lure in sight, the spinner winking as it sped through the water, when each of them shot off in a different direction. I didn’t worry about them; I had the lure in and was lifting my arm for a second attempt at the spot where I could make out a number of fish maintaining their position. This time, I let the lure descend through the water for an extra — Mississippi before drawing it in. A new fish peeled away from the school after it. I decided not to speed up my retrieve, but kept winding the handle one-two one-two one-two. Below the fish, which appeared larger than either of the first pair by a couple of inches, the murk that hung in the water churned. I wound the line in, one-two one-two. The fish was at the lure—

— and was gone, chased away by the thing that rose from the murk beneath it, took the bait in its mouth, and rolled into a dive. I had an impression of a body thick as the trunk of a small tree, covered with scales pale as the moon. Had I not left the drag loose, the fish would have snapped my line like thread. As it was, the rod bowed with the pressure the thing applied to it. The fish wasn’t swimming especially fast — the line spooled out of the reel at an almost leisurely pace — but it was going far. It sank deep into the murk, to what I estimated must be the bottom of the pool, before turning into a wide circle. I had no idea what had taken my lure. It certainly wasn’t a trout, or a bass, or any of the panfish. From its size and its strength, I guessed it might be a carp, which was not a fish I’d anticipated running into here. But there are times you pull something out of the water for which there’s no accounting, the only remnant of a story whose contours are a mystery. However it had come to inhabit this pool, a carp had the power to break my line with a toss of its head. If I wanted to land it, I was going to have to alter my usual strategy. I tested the handle, the rod dipping as the line tightened. “Easy,” I murmured, half to myself, half to the fish. I could feel him down there in the dark, feel his weight and his muscle. I gave the handle another turn, stopping when the fish began to draw more line, doubling back into a wider circle. I guessed he was testing this thing that had jabbed into him. I waited to see whether he would maintain his present course, or take off in a new direction. Once he appeared content to continue swimming in a broad circle, I started turning the handle slowly, gradually shifting his sweep closer to me.

At some point during this long process, Dan noticed that I had something on the end of my line and that it wasn’t behaving in the usual fashion. I can’t say exactly how long his curiosity as to what, exactly, I was doing required to overcome his annoyance with my questioning him, but by the time I had the fish in near enough that I could see the murk churning as he plowed through it, Dan was standing at my right side. He said, “What’ve you got?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “Carp, maybe.”

“Carp? Here?”

“Too big for a trout or bass.”

“Maybe it’s a pike.”

“Could be,” I said. “Doesn’t act like one.”

“Doesn’t act much like a carp, either,” Dan said.

“No argument there.”

Because Dan was next to me, when the fish swam up out of the murk into view, I had his reaction to gauge mine against, his “What the hell?” to reassure me that he’d witnessed what I had. How I didn’t drop the rod, or jerk it up and snap the line, I can’t say. For one thing, the fish was huge, easily four feet from nose to tail. Too big, I would have said, to have survived in a spot this size for very long — unless it went much, much deeper than it seemed. For another thing, what I glimpsed of its head was unlike anything I’d encountered in any of the places I’d cast my line. Rounded, its large, dark eyes set forward, its mouth jammed with teeth like steak knives, the front end of the thing resembled what you’d expect to run across in the depths of the ocean.

“Guess it isn’t a carp, after all,” I said.

“What…” Dan’s voice trailed off.

“I don’t know.” The fish was slowing, the tension on the line slacking. I turned the handle faster, tightening the line, ready for the fish to change course. If he didn’t, if he completed another circuit of the pool, his next pass would bring him close enough for me to attempt bringing him in. Although one part of my mind had picked up Dan’s “What the hell?” and was chanting it like a mantra, and another section of my mind was working at answering how an apparent denizen of the lower deep could have found its way into a small body of water in upstate New York, enough of my brain remained available to calculate the best trajectory for guiding the fish onto the spit of rock supporting me. The fish was swinging in my direction, rising in the water as he came. His dorsal fin, a fan of pale flesh stretched between spines the length of my forearm, broke into the air like the back of a dragon. I said, “Dan.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m going to see if I can’t steer this fellow right up onto this ledge in front of me. You see what I’m talking about?”

“Sure, but—”

“Once I get him on the rock, I’m going to hand the rod to you and do my best to manhandle him out of the water.”

“But—”

“Just be ready to take the rod from me.”

The more I said, the better I felt, the more confident. It was as if, by speaking my plan, I was setting it up to happen. The fish was slowing, the spines on his back listing as he swam nearer. I resisted the urge to wind the handle as fast as I could. He might be done, or he might be readying for a dive. He was close, now, so close I could see his face in all its hideous glory. Dan leaned in to me, his hands out for the rod. “Almost there,” I said, “almost there.” The front half of the fish slid over the rock shelf. There was barely enough line for me to reel in, but I drew him up the shelf, to where the water shallowed. Once his tail was over the rock, I passed the rod to Dan and took a step towards the fish. As I did, he raised his head and neck partway out of the pool, as if readying to fling himself off the rock. His eyes, I saw, were empty pits. While I was debating whether to grab the line or tackle him, the fish settled back under the water and was still.

I splashed into the pool and plunged my hands into it, well back of the fish’s weird head and its sharp teeth. His gills were barely moving. I gripped the forward gill on either side of him and backed up. Ready for a fight, I moved fast, hauling his bulk most of the way out of the water before releasing my hold and falling on my ass. I had been expecting the edges of his gills to be sharp, and was prepared to chance the injury to my hands to secure such a catch, but the flaps of skin were rubbery, almost soft. When it thumped onto the rock, tremors shivering its bulk, its entire body gave the impression that it was less solid than gelid. Strange, yes, but no more so than this creature being in this pool in the first place. I could feel the grin splitting my mouth. I was in a position the envy of everyone who’s ever spent any time working the rod and reel: I had my fantastic story, and I had the proof of it. Who knew what this would mean for me? My picture in the paper, an honored spot on Howard’s wall, at least. I turned to Dan, who had not relaxed his hold on the rod. “It’s okay,” I said, pushing myself to my feet, “we got him.” I held out my hand, and Dan returned the rod. “Thanks,” I said. “Couldn’t have done it without you, buddy.”

“Abe,” Dan said.

“Definitely not a carp,” I said. “Definitely, positively.” I was trying to figure out the best means for transporting my catch over the hills to my truck. Maybe if I took off my raincoat, we could fashion a sling out of it that we could hoist on a pair of branches. It would require some work, but—

“Abe,” Dan said.

“What?”

“I — that isn’t a fish.”

“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.

“Goddamnit,” I said again. Apparently, Dan’s and Howard’s lunacy was catching. I turned and knelt beside my tacklebox. At the bottom of it, underneath packets of rubber worms and loose bobbers, was a knife I’d picked up at a yard sale a few years ago. It looked like your average wooden ruler, a foot long, blond wood, but there was a seam at the six-inch mark. Grip the ruler to either side of that and tug, and a six-inch filleting blade slid out of inches six through twelve. I was thinking that I would draw a little more line out of my reel, then use the knife to cut it. I could secure the extra line to a rock, and if there was any mercy in heaven, once I returned from fetching Dan, the fish would still be here.

As I was standing, something caught at the top of my vision. At the edge of the treeline, thirty feet away, a slender white figure rested its right hand on the trunk of a hemlock. Naked, her hair and skin soaking, a young woman regarded me from eyes as golden as any fish’s. I want to say it took a moment for her face to register, but that isn’t true. Immediately, I knew her, as if I’d only just now watched her chest rise and fall for the last time.

It was Marie.

V. There Fissure

Already, she was sinking into the woods. I couldn’t find the words to tell her to stop, couldn’t find the voice to utter them. It didn’t matter. I was moving forward, propelled by legs still half-asleep. Arms out, mouth moving dumbly, steps stumbling, I staggered after her like a kid playing Frankenstein. My heart — I could not feel my heart, nor the emotion gripping it. What I felt was too big — it was as if it were outside me, a current that had swept me up and was rushing me along. Everything around me, the rock, the trees, the Creek, the rain, seemed to be part of that feeling, of that motion. The only thing separate from it was her, Marie, whose golden eyes did not blink as her bare feet took her deeper into the forest. Her skin was pale, pale as the flesh of a lily, but it was as unblemished as it had been the first time she had dropped her robe in front of me in a hotel room in Burlington. She might have stepped to this moment directly from that one, before the scars on her chest, the bruises on her arms, before her scalp bared, her cheeks dulled, before her body shrank to her bones as the cancer consumed her. All that was different were her eyes, whose metallic hue seemed in keeping with the strangeness of seeing her, here.

You may have read or watched reports of folks who thought a loved one was dead, killed in an accident or catastrophe, and subsequently had that news contradicted when the supposedly deceased opened the front door. You can appreciate how those people must have felt. Here they were, trying to adjust to their loved one’s having been wrenched from the category of the living and thrust into that of the dead. Of course the mind resists such a dramatic change, so in addition to the joy that leapt in them at the sight of their loved one, a small voice inside them must have whispered, “I knew it.” No matter that your wife is lying without breathing on the hospital bed before you, that the nurses have switched off all the machines that were monitoring her and disconnected the wires that allowed them to, you can’t accept it. You may understand it, but you can’t admit the fact into yourself. That surrender has to be negotiated over time. Once it has been accomplished, however, you can imagine how upsetting — how deeply, fundamentally traumatic — it would be to find yourself confronted by the person you had relinquished to death.

My strides were more confident, hers, not as quick. I might have guessed she wanted me to catch her, but I couldn’t read anything in those eyes. At last, she stopped, her back to a large maple. I was so focused on her face that I almost crashed into her. Closer to her than I had intended, I halted, the momentum of my pursuit carrying speech past my lips. “Marie,” I said, the name somewhere between a question and a statement. “Marie.”

“Abe,” she said in the voice I’d resigned myself to hearing only on our wedding video’s tinny soundtrack. Not like this, the rich, slightly throaty tone that rose up into whatever she was saying, filling it with her warmth and intelligence. At the sound of it, my vision swam with tears.

I wiped my eyes, swallowed. “How?”

For a reply, she lifted her right hand to my face and pressed her fingers to my lips. Her fingertips were cool, her skin charged with the briny smell of the sea, but her touch was as solid, as real, as ever it had been. I caught her hand in both of mine. She raised her other hand to my cheek.

A sob I hadn’t been aware was forming burst from me. A second, and a third, followed it, each eruption of sound a convulsion that doubled me over, squeezing tears from my eyes. Marie’s hand in mine, I dropped to my knees, sobs shaking me. She sank beside me, her free hand touching my face, my ear, pushing back my cap to slide her fingers into my damp hair. “Shhh,” she said, “shhhh.” My tears pattered on the dead leaves underneath me. Interspersed with my sobs, a low, keening moan escaped my lips. To be sure, I had wept over Marie, before this. I had cried at her bedside. I had cried at her graveside. I had cried liquor-flavored tears many a night thereafter. The river of tears that rolls through all those old sad songs had poured down my cheeks. But what had me now was of a different order of magnitude entirely. This was no river; it was an ocean forcing its way through a canal. I brought Marie’s hand to my mouth and kissed it over and over again. Her left hand shoved my cap off and stroked my hair. She leaned in to me. The briny tang of her skin filled my nostrils.

She pressed her lips to my forehead. Then to my eyebrows. Then to my eyelids. When she reached the bridge of my nose, she started to make the soft noises, little sighs and groans, which in another life had signaled her growing arousal. She slipped her hand out of mine and used it to lift my chin so that my lips could meet hers. Her mouth was as cool as the rest of her, but she kissed me the way she always had, a press that softened into a caress. She took my head in her hands as she extended the kiss. I was not done sobbing, but the sobs lessened as I responded to her. The moan that was issuing from me was changing tone, sorrow giving way to desire. Marie’s hands were moving down my neck, to the collar of my shirt, to the zipper of my raincoat, which she pinched and lowered. My hands were clasped in front of me, as if I were praying, but when her fingers started unbuttoning my shirt, I released them and reached for her breasts. They were full in my hands, the nipples raised at my touch, and she gasped into my mouth as I cupped them. Her hands moved faster, tugging my shirt out of my jeans, slipping up under my t-shirt and sliding over my chest. I was fever-hot with the want of her, and her cool skin was a balm on mine. Her hands were at my belt; mine were on her hips.

I have desired women before: Marie, yes, and the handful who preceded her, and the few who followed her. I’ve known the hand-shaking eagerness of the young, and the dry-mouthed anticipation of the more experienced. There was a time I broke the speed limit and blew through at least two stop-signs in response to a suggestive phone call Marie made. There was another time I emerged from what had seemed a particularly vivid dream of us making love to discover Marie moving on top of me. The emotion that filled me now, though — it was as if the grief that had been pouring through me had ignited, sparked furnace hot. There was desire present in it, but it was fueled by the grief, which gave my appetite a searing urgency. As Marie dragged my fly down, I pushed her over onto her back. Leaves rustled; twigs cracked. I could not read the expression in her eyes, but her hands guided me into her. She was as cool inside as she was outside, but I was plenty hot for the both of us. “Oh, Abe,” she said. I tried to reply, but couldn’t, all my attention taken by what was happening between us. Her legs raised, clasped my hips. I pressed against her. She gasped and turned her head to the right, closing her golden eyes. I kissed the corner of her mouth. She murmured the sweet obscenities that had first shocked and then aroused me. I groaned. Her head tilted back. We moved faster. She pushed her hands through my hair. We moved slower. She flung her arms out to either side of her. We moved faster again. She cried out a long series of cries, and I shouted as the torrent that had been rising within me found release.

Head swimming, I eased myself off Marie and onto my back. Once upon a time, I would have cracked a joke — at the very least, said, “I love you.” But nothing I could think of seemed appropriate — adequate. Truth to tell, there wasn’t a whole lot of organized activity happening between my ears. The conflagration roaring through me had blown out, extinguished by the finish to Marie’s and my lovemaking, leaving me empty, scoured and scorched by its ferocity. Aware of her beside me, I gazed up at the trees pointing to the clouds overhead, blinking at the rain that made it through the lattice of branches. Mother-of-pearl, the clouds struck me as blindingly beautiful. My mind a pleasant blank, I turned to Marie.

What was sharing the forest floor with me had the same gold eyes, but the rest of its face might have leapt out of a nightmare. Its nose was flat, the nostrils a pair of slits over a broad mouth whose lower jaw jutted forward, exposing the row of daggered teeth lining it. Its hair was stringy, a mane of tendrils. The hand it rested on my chest was webbed, each thick finger capped by a heavy claw. Its mouth opened, and gave forth a sigh of post-coital contentment.

More than anything else, that exhalation sent me scrambling away, crab-crawling as fast as my arms and legs would move me. Had my pants not been bunched around my ankles, I might have gotten further; as it was, my legs caught on one another and set me down on my ass, hard. I grabbed for my belt, simultaneously trying to raise myself to my feet, but the thing that had taken Marie’s place — the thing that had been Marie — was up and approaching me, its webbed hands out in front of it. “Abe,” it said.

Despite myself, I said, “Marie?”

The thing’s features shimmered, as if I were seeing them through a layer of water across which a succession of ripples passed. They settled, and I was looking at Marie. “Abe,” she said, and stepped toward me.

“You stay right there!” I backpedaled, yanking up my jeans as I went. My heel caught a root, dumping me on my ass, yet again. When I stood this time, I had found the filleting knife where I’d slipped it into the pocket of my raincoat and had it out and unsheathed; although, to be honest, I’d never appreciated quite how small it was. Not to mention, I had no idea how to use it outside of cleaning a fish.

“Abe,” Marie — I didn’t know how else to think of her — said.

“What are you?” I said.

She didn’t answer.

“What are you!” The knife trembled in my grip.

“A reflection,” Marie said.

“Of what?”

She smiled, faintly.

I didn’t understand. I said, “You are not my wife.”

She didn’t answer that, either.

“Where are we? What is this place?”

“Dutchman’s Creek.”

“That’s — what about the fish?” I said. “The one I caught over there,” I flung my arm in the general direction of the pool.

“What about it?”

“What is it?”

“A nymph,” Marie said.

“I don’t — what do you mean?”

“You’ll have to come upstream to find out.”

Upstream reminded me of Dan, who had vanished from my mind the instant I’d recognized Marie. “Sonofabitch,” I said. If I had encountered Marie — or this thing passing for Marie — did that mean he’d found what he was searching for? Or that he thought he’d found it? “I came here with a friend,” I said.

“Yes,” Marie said. “Dan. Your fishing buddy.”

“I think — he wanted to go upstream. He was hoping he’d find—”

“His family, Sophie and their boys.”

“Did he?”

“Would you like me to take you to him?”

I could not conceive of any way in which accompanying Marie to wherever she had in mind could be a good idea. But what else was there for me to do? I swallowed. “I guess you’d better.”

“It’s this way.” She turned away from me and set off through the woods on a course roughly parallel to that of the stream. Keeping my knife in hand, I followed her, stooping to pick up my cap where it had fallen. I figured we’d be climbing and traveling the ridge I’d crossed to find the Creek; for the moment, though, our path ran more or less level. I used my free hand to stuff my t-shirt inside my jeans, but couldn’t button my shirt one-handed. I solved the problem by clenching the knife between my teeth long enough for me to button and tuck my shirt. Ridiculous as it sounds, I was worried about Dan taking one look at me and knowing I’d had sex with whatever Marie was. It was a way, I suppose, for me to keep from dwelling on our act in the leaves. I could not believe this shape picking its way through the branches and twigs strewn on the ground was not my wife. She lifted her leg, her foot pointing down like a ballerina’s, and I saw her stepping into the bath. The cheeks of her ass rolled up and down, and I was propping myself up on one elbow, watching her cross the bedroom to the dresser. What I had glimpsed of her other face had been as real as what was in front of me — or no more unreal, if that makes any sense — and if I pictured that Marie moaning underneath me, her mouth opening and closing like a bass gasping in the air, I had to fight the urge to run in the direction of the Creek with all due haste. But looking at the curve of her spine brought to mind all the times I’d pressed my thumbs into the muscles to either side of it, massaging away the day’s tension. Maybe it was the afterglow, or maybe, when you got right down to brass tacks, I wasn’t that much different from Dan, desperate for any chance to recover what I’d lost, no matter what I had to look past to do so.

Ahead of me, Marie stopped. I slowed, drawing up to her but maintaining what I hoped was a safe distance. In front of us, a road ran across the forest floor. Composed of rounded stones sunk into the earth beside one another, it reminded me of the cobblestoned streets workmen in Wiltwyck occasionally uncovered when they were repairing a city street. These stones, though, were much larger, a yard across, and had been worn flat. I’m not much of a geologist: they might have been marble, or they might have been another, whitish rock. Stalks of grass sprouted from the spaces between the stones, while the ground to either side of the road, which was clear of leaves, had a red tint I hadn’t encountered in these parts. This could have been an old country road, bypassed by newer and better routes and forgotten, but it didn’t feel like that. It seemed ancient, as if it had been supporting the footsteps of men and women for as long as they’d been around. Which was impossible for this area, I knew, where the Native peoples had not favored this type of construction, and where the European settlers who had succeeded them and who would have laid such a path had been present for only the last few centuries.

My impression of the pathway’s age, however, was buttressed by the pedestal situated on the other side of the road about twenty yards to the left. A simple column, four feet high or thereabouts, supported a statue carved in that idealized way that reminds you of classical Greece or Rome. More or less life-sized, the sculpture was of a woman wearing a plain, sleeveless dress that reached to her feet. The woman was pregnant, enormously so, on-the-verge-of-delivering-her-baby big. She cradled her belly in her hands, the way that expectant mothers sometimes do. She was also headless, her neck a smooth stump. From where I was standing, I couldn’t tell if the statue’s headlessness was intentional, or an act of vandalism. What appeared to be red paint, long faded to brown, had been splashed around the sculpture’s neck, but that could as easily have been dirt from beside the road someone had smeared on it.

“The Mother,” Marie said.

“What?”

“The statue you’re staring at. It’s of the Mother.”

“Who’s that?”

“A very old goddess.”

“Oh. What about this?” I pointed my knife at the road.

“That takes you to a city.”

“A city?”

“A city by the sea,” she said. “I don’t think you’d care to visit it.”

“By the sea?”

“It’s different here.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll see,” she said, and crossed the road. I went after her, but I continued to glance at the statue of the deity Marie had named the Mother, until the trees obscured my view of it.

Across the road, the forest floor was less crowded with dead leaves and fallen branches. Around me, the trees, mainly evergreens, seemed ranked in straight lines. I supposed we might be passing through a tree farm of some sort, or could be, it was a patch where the trees happened to grow like this. The rain was no longer falling — hadn’t been for some time, now that I thought of it. I wasn’t sure exactly how long, but since before we’d arrived at the road, anyway.

One of the trees Marie was walking to the left of caught my eye. It was unlike any of the local trees I’d come to recognize over the course of years spent wandering through them on the way to the day’s fishing spot. If anything, it resembled a young child’s image of a tree, a straight trunk crowned with a large ball of leaves. But, to carry the comparison a tad further, it was as if the kid who’d committed this tree to paper had used oil paint, while the rest of the kids in the daycare stuck to whatever used crayons they’d been given. The tree was so vivid you might have believed it wasn’t an actual, living thing but a sculpture cast in metal and lit from within. Had I not had a view of other, similar trees standing beyond it, I would have been tempted to such a view. The rough bark that wrapped the trunk held what light there was and shone a dull bronze; the leaves clustered above it seemed to pass different shades of green back and forth amongst themselves. As I approached the tree, a citrus smell, like oranges on the turn, saturated the air. The individual leaves were shaped like spearheads, their edges serrated. I held up my hand to touch one of them, and hesitated at the prospect of those jagged edges. When I lowered my arm, Marie, who had stopped a slight distance ahead to watch me, said, “That was the right decision. If you aren’t careful, the leaves will slice to the bone.”

“Right.” The prospect of more of these trees in front of us was not reassuring.

I found, though, that while the Vivid Trees — as I thought of them — gradually supplanted the assortment of evergreens, maples, and birch that had surrounded us on the other side of the strange road, they didn’t appear to grow especially close together, allowing us a reasonable amount of room to pass safely among them. Nor did they hinder the progress of the person I saw walking through them in our direction. The moment’s hope I had it was Dan, searching for me, died as I saw the man striding towards us wearing a large, baggy coat that hung most of the way down his legs. It was dark, from wear more than its tailor’s design. The fellow’s chest was crisscrossed by the straps of an assortment of bags and sacks he was carrying, all of which bounced against him with each step. He was wearing a hat that resembled a nightcap someone had forgotten to finish. He was younger than I was, but older than Dan, the stringy beard on his jaw a failed effort he hadn’t given up on. His eyes were brown and big, and they grew bigger still at the sight of Marie naked before him. He called out a greeting I couldn’t distinguish, raising his right hand in what I took for a friendly wave. I figured him for a fellow-traveler, lost in wherever-the-hell-this-was.

Marie had halted when the man came into view. As he neared, she seemed to go out of focus, the ripple I’d witnessed previously sweeping over her. When the stranger was within ten or fifteen feet of her, the distortion blew away and she was transformed. Taller by a good six inches, her hair darker, curled, her pale form was covered by the most horrendous wounds. Great gashes peeled back the skin and meat of her arms, her ribs, her legs, left flesh hanging in ribbons and flaps. Deeper punctures opened her back. A ragged gash ran most of the way round her neck. Those places her skin had remained uncut, it was heavily bruised. A sound swelled from her torn throat, a scream that was as much fury as agony. My knees shook with it — with all of it.

His expression slackened by astonishment, the traveler stuttered a brace of words I couldn’t hear for the screaming. In answer, Marie shrieked at him in a language I didn’t recognize; though I didn’t have to understand it to feel the venom coursing through it. Whatever she said, the fellow flinched as if she’d slapped him full across the face. Her outburst continued, and as it did, she appeared to gain in height, her hair to rise off her shoulders, her feet to lift from the ground. The man had removed his cap and was twisting it in his hands, tears streaking his face, attempting a reply, but Marie would have none of it. She spat a series of phrases at him, the exclamation points at the end of each practically visible. At last, the fellow could take it no more, and fled from her, sprinting to his right, packs flapping, in the direction Marie had said the city by the sea lay. She flung a scattering of invectives after him.

The furious ruin she’d become turned in my direction. I was standing with my knife held out in front of me like an undersized sword, a look of stunned horror weighting my face. Marie’s features were charged with a violence that, for a moment, I feared she would direct at me. Then she shimmered, settling to the ground, and resolved into herself, again.

“Marie?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, considering my knife as if noticing it for the first time.

“What — what was all that?”

“An image.”

“Of what?”

“Something that happened a long time ago.”

“Do you know who that man was?”

“Yes,” she said, “I will.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“It isn’t important. He needed to go someplace. I helped him.” Apparently satisfied with her answer, she resumed her course. I was quaking-in-my-boots-afraid to keep after her, but I was absolutely terrified to walk away from her. Allowing an extra ten feet between us — which I guessed wouldn’t be much help if she resumed this aspect — I pursued her.

My mind wasn’t processing the events of the last couple of hours in any appreciable way. It was more taking each of them in and storing it for further review. I suppose this was because the morning had already been so fluid, one outrageous occurrence yielding to the next, even more outrageous one. Some underlying awareness of that quality allowed me not to surrender entirely to the extremes of emotion that buffeted me. I’d be lying, though, committing a sin of omission, if I didn’t admit the role that watching Marie’s calves move played in my decision to keep walking through the citrus-scented woods.

The trees had started to draw in closer together, not enough to hinder our passage, but sufficient for me to pay them extra attention. In front of us and to the left, they gathered in a small grove. Through the gaps among their trunks, I glimpsed what I took for other trees, their trunks white and smooth. As we approached the grove, I heard the wind picking up and falling off again; though the leaves on the trees beside us were undisturbed. Now I saw that the white trees were in fact stone columns, arranged in a circle, joined at the tops by their support of a domed roof, one part of which had fallen in. Temple or monument, the structure gave the same impression of incredible age as the road we’d crossed. I was tempted to detour to it, but decided it would be better to locate Dan first.

Beyond the temple and its grove, the smell of citrus was interrupted by another, the stench of meat a day into spoiling, accented by the copper reek of blood. The sound of the wind gusting was drowned out by the heavy buzz of flies. In a small clearing, we found the source of smell and sound: the carcass of a huge animal, its legs splayed out to either side of it, its head gone, cut from the thick neck that had spilled a lake of blood onto the forest floor. Fat, black and green flies half the length of my thumb roamed the beast’s back, its flanks, sat at the shore of blood and sipped from it. From the sheer size of its remains, I assumed the animal must be an elephant, albeit one whose coat was a rich, red-gold. Its legs, however, ended in hooves, each one large as a man’s chest. I had paused to survey the remains; Marie had stopped and was waiting for me. I said, “What is this?”

“One of the Oxen of the Sun,” she said.

“I never knew cattle could grow so big.”

“These are special — sacred, you could say.”

“Not too sacred, if someone did this to it. Do you have any idea what happened?”

“It was taken,” she said, “for bait.”

“Bait? For what?”

She uttered a word I didn’t recognize; it sounded like “Apep.” I said, “I don’t know what that is.”

“Not what — who.”

“Okay. I don’t know who that is.”

“Come this way,” Marie said. “We’re almost there.”

Away from the carcass of the great cattle, the odor of decay receded, the ebb and flow of the wind returned. Except, I understood that I hadn’t been listening to air, I’d been hearing water, the rush of the surf rolling itself up a beach. Marie and I had arrived at the edge of the woods we’d been crossing. The Vivid Trees ended in a line so straight it might have been planted there. Beyond them, an expanse of reddish ground rose into a low hill that Marie was already climbing. She continued over the top, and down the far slope. I stopped at the crest.

An ocean sprawled before me, its corrugated surface black as ink. Long, foaming waves tumbled and splashed onto a rocky beach. Distances are tricky to estimate over water, but at least two hundred yards offshore, a spur of gray rock slanted up from the water and ran parallel to the beach on my right, forming a kind of bay. Marie headed in this direction, picking her way across the stones that cluttered the beach. Larger waves burst against the stone wall, tossing spray high into a sky that was empty of the gulls you would have expected to see hanging in it, crying to one another. Nor did there appear to be any of the detritus you usually encounter on a beach, no clumps of dried seaweed hopping with sandfleas, no driftwood scrubbed and bleached into abstract sculpture, no fragments of crab left by sloppy gulls. Although the waves continued to collapse onto the shore, there were none of the tidal pools higher up that might have indicated the water had been any closer. There wasn’t much of a sea smell, the briny stink of the ocean and its contents. A fine mist shone on the rocks closer to the water; otherwise, the scene was curiously static, as if I was surveying a vista that had not changed in millennia.

Already, Marie had moved uncomfortably far down the beach. I descended the hill. Stones clattered under my boots. To my left, the surf curled onto the beach with a hissing rumble, while further away, the ocean struck the rock wall with irregular booms. To my right, up the rise, the Vivid Trees maintained formation. A mile or so along the shore, the rock barrier swept in towards the shore, lifting into a cluster of large, jagged rocks. There was activity down there, a lot of it. Figures moved to and fro on the beach and, it appeared, in and out of the ocean — but I was too far removed to distinguish their actions.

I assumed Dan would be waiting for me, ahead. How he had found his way here, I couldn’t guess; though after what had befallen me, I supposed I shouldn’t have been too surprised at it. It seemed reasonable to imagine he’d encountered Sophie and his children, just as I’d met Marie. What it all meant was beyond me, which I knew was not a good thing, but which I hoped to delay reckoning with for as long as possible.

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.

“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.

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.

Useful though it might be, neither detective appeared especially happy with my version of events; whether because they sensed me holding back, or because their occupation had made them suspicious of everyone, I couldn’t say. How did I explain the cuts on my arm? they wanted to know. I didn’t, I said. I was in the water with all kinds of debris. Who knew what I’d run into? They asked what had happened to my fishing rod. I said I wished I knew. That rod had done well by me; the detectives would not have believed some of the fish I’d hooked on it. I supposed it had been carried away by the creek, or maybe by a fellow fisherman with an eye for value and flexible morals. The two of them did their best to determine how I’d felt about Dan, which was to say, whether I’d had the urge to murder him, but I could answer without any dissembling that Dan had been about the best friend I’d had, and the prospect of not seeing him again filled me with grief.

And for a long time after that, I did mourn Dan. My bruises and cuts healed, the rib I’d cracked knit, and my immune system got the upper hand on the infection long enough for me to be discharged, finally, from the hospital. While I was recuperating at home, my manager stopped over to visit me; though his purpose had more to do with business than solicitude. Technically, I was already supposed to have decided if I wanted to take early retirement and the one-time payout being offered to incentivize it, or if I preferred to stay with the company and risk being laid off. Because of my accident, my boss had convinced his boss and those above him to grant me an extension. He never came out and said so, but there was no doubt in my mind that, were I not to choose to exit my job under my own steam, I would be shoved out the door. It’s funny: with all I’d been through, you would expect that this would have appeared, in comparison, of little consequence. Yet I was furious, so much so that I stood from the kitchen table, asked the young fellow to excuse me, and walked out into my front yard.

I’ll say this to my manager’s credit, he let me go. My head abuzz, I stalked around the bungalow Marie and I had intended for a starter home. I don’t suppose my sentiments were any different from those of the thousands of others who’d been in this spot before me. This isn’t right. I’ve given years — decades — of my life to this business. I’ve done my part to make if the success it has been for so long. I’ve been genuinely proud of it, to count myself among its employees. Hell, I wouldn’t have met my wife without it. This isn’t fair.

All of which was true, as far as it went, and none of which made the least bit of difference. I flirted with telling my boss I’d take my chances, only I knew there’d be no chance involved. Nor was there any point to remaining outside. Before I could second-guess myself, I returned inside, thanked my manager for his patience, and told him I’d decided to take the buyout. He seemed relieved.

Like that, I was without my job, without my closest friend, and without the activity that had organized the most recent part of my life, and that I had anticipated structuring my retirement around. Gone fishin’, right? I tried to return to it, the following year, after a winter spent watching too much TV and eyeing the liquor cabinet. I outfitted myself with good gear, not quite the top of the line, but not too far removed from it. The first day of trout season, I pulled out of my driveway with the moon tucking itself under the horizon, headed for a stream on the other side of Frenchman’s Mountain where my luck had held more often than not. I was the first one at what I thought of as my spot; although a group of other, younger guys in a jeep with Pennsylvania plates parked behind me five minutes later. We exchanged nods as they walked past me sitting in the cab, sipping coffee from my travel mug, and we acknowledged one another again in the mid-afternoon, as they made their way back to their vehicle. I was in the driver’s seat, still, from which I’d moved only to relieve my bladder. During the sixty seconds I’d spent outside my truck, I had listened to the water splashing on the other side of a line of maples, and had thought that it would be very easy for me to stroll down to it for a look. Then I’d climbed into the cab and locked the door. The light was draining from the sky before I admitted defeat and started the engine.

My next attempts were no more successful. The drive to and from whatever point on the map I’d selected presented no difficulty. To a certain extent, neither did sitting beside whatever stream or river I’d chosen. Any effort I made to approach the water for purposes of fishing sent me straight to the truck, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. There was no particular emotion associated with it, no upwelling of panic, or terror; my body simply refused to entertain, much less obey, my brain’s commands.

The panic and terror were reserved for my dreams, which would replay and remix the images and actions of that Saturday for years to come. My lost fishing rod in my hands, I reeled in the large fish Marie had called a nymph; only, when I hauled it out of the water this time, its front end encased not a skull, but Dan’s head, his eyes gone, his mouth open in a bloody scream. A traffic light hanging amidst the trees overhead, Marie’s feet rose from the forest floor, her skin peeling off in ribbons and streamers, her hair streaming around her head like water grass. His face rigid with anger, Dan lifted a rock that through some trick of perspective was also the boulder to which the Fisherman was tied and brought it crashing down on my head. The vast eye of the Fisherman’s catch opened, and black water spilled from the great crack of its pupil in a flood. If I slept during the day, in the sunlight, I found the dreams weren’t quite as bad, so I spent much of each night channel surfing and paging through whatever books I’d checked out of the library, trying to keep myself awake until the eastern sky began to forecast the sun’s arrival.

When I wasn’t trapped in terrifying dreams of him, I grieved for Dan; though my grief, as you might expect, was a somewhat complicated affair. I fancied I understood the desperation that had led Dan to Dutchman’s Creek, and the Fisherman, and whatever the exact deal he’d struck with that being. I knew first-hand the exhilaration of finding your dearly departed — or a nearly perfect approximation — waiting for you, and I could appreciate what a motivation Sophie and the boys must have been for Dan. As bad a state as I’d witnessed him in at work — and as he’d confessed himself to be, circling his maelstrom — he must have felt as if he’d been thrown a life-preserver, pulled back from ruin by the very figures whose deaths had spun him towards it.

The problem was, there must have been a moment when Dan had seen Sophie and the boys for what they were, had glimpsed their true faces, if only for a second. He must have realized that, even if these creatures were what remained of his wife and children, they had been changed, transformed by their passage out of this life into something else, something fundamentally different from him. He must have known that he was buying into a scenario that was, on some level, a lie, and he had been willing to sacrifice the reality of friendship, however mundane, in favor of that lie. I reckon I shouldn’t sound as surprised as I’m sure I do; the world’s full of folks who’ve done the same, if not in as dramatic a fashion. It’s just, you think all those hours sitting beside one another, watching the water of this stream or that slide by, waiting for a fish to take our bait, making small talk and occasionally bigger talk — you think all of that would count for something, that the fact of it would weigh against the fantasy that tempted him.

But I guess it didn’t. Not enough, anyway. I missed Dan’s company, and the memory of his end filled me with horror, but no matter how kind or generous my recollections of Dan Drescher were, a certain bitterness flavored them. To be honest, the week Dan’s cousins were around to dispose of his house and possessions, I was nervous they might request a visit with me, which I didn’t see how I could refuse, but which I couldn’t imagine how I could go through with — at least, in a way that didn’t leave them confused and angry. Fortunately, the phone never rang.

The years that unwound after this, I spent trying to occupy myself. Earlier in my life, if you’d asked me how I envisioned spending my retirement, my answer would have centered on Marie, the children I projected us having. Maybe we would drop in on them at their colleges, or tour some distant country, like India, or do one of those stereotypically old-people things, like board a cruise to Alaska. Later, after she was gone, I would have pictured post-employment taken up by fishing, with Dan, once he started to accompany me. Absent Marie, Dan, and fishing, I cast about for things to do. I visited family, met former co-workers from IBM out for a beer and a burger. I saw a lot of Frank Block when his wife left him for their dentist, but those meals were more therapy sessions for him than actual conversations, and they tapered off pretty soon after he took up with one of his neighbors. I did what I could to renew my interest in live music, driving into Huguenot or up to Woodstock to listen to whoever was playing the local clubs. Most of what I heard was earnest, if unexciting, but every now and again, a singer would lean into the mic, draw her fingers down the strings of her guitar, open her mouth, and I would lean forward in my chair, attentive. I hadn’t anticipated my retirement consisting of this much empty time to fill; though I chalked that up to my having entered it at least a decade ahead of schedule, and in pretty good health, too.

As for everything I’d seen, heard, touched — everything I’d learned, or thought I’d learned — on that last fishing trip: most of the time, I didn’t dwell on it. It was there, the great mass of it was always there, wherever I was, whatever I was doing, but short of returning to Dutchman’s Creek to see if I could find my way back to the black ocean, there wasn’t much for me to do about it. On and off, I did a little bit of digging around, opening the family Bible, rereading portions of Genesis and Job, checking books on comparative mythology out of the library, but none of it added up to anything resembling sense. When the internet became widely available, I put it to work interpreting my experience, but the only site that looked as if it might be of use crashed each time I consulted it. The problem was, my desire to know did not exceed my desire to allow sleeping dogs to enjoy their dreams. Could be, if there had been any hope of such information serving a practical purpose, such as easing my nightmares, my sentiments might have been different. But it was hard to conceive how the things I’d witnessed could have been salved by anything I might learn about them, so in the end, I let my investigations, such as they were, stop.

Something similar, a kind of parallel process, returned me to fishing. About three years ago, now, a young family moved into the house next to mine. Father, mother, and two girls, one fifteen, the other ten and every bit the outdoorswoman. Within a day or two of their arrival, I saw the younger girl, Sadie, striking out across her backyard, a fishing rod in one hand, a tacklebox in the other. A quarter-mile or so in back of both our properties, there’s a small stream that descends from Frenchman’s Mountain and winds its way to the Svartkil. I guessed this was Sadie’s destination, and while I wasn’t sure how wise it was for a child her age to go tramping off into the woods on her won, I was more sure how it would appear were her older male neighbor to run after her. I had a pair of binoculars Marie had used for bird watching in its case in the hall closet; I dug them out and used them to keep a discrete eye on Sadie for the couple of hours she spent at the stream.

Later that night, I made sure to be out wheeling my garbage can to the end of the driveway when Sadie’s dad, Oliver, was setting out his trash. I’d already introduced myself to the family, offered what assistance was mine to give should they require it. I called hello to Oliver, asked him how he and his family were settling in. Pretty well, he answered, which gave me the opening I needed to remark that I thought I’d noted one of his daughters with her fishing rod out. He laughed and said I must’ve seen Sadie, on her way to check the stream behind the house. Oh, I said, did he fish, too? Not as much as he used to, Oliver said, but Sadie more than made up for him. His younger girl was obsessed with fishing. Is that so? I said. I used to do a little fishing, myself, from time to time. If he or his daughter had any questions as to what they might catch where, I’d be happy to share what I knew. Oliver thanked me, but with a reserve that suggested maybe I’d overplayed my hand.

The next day, however, there was a knock on my front door, and when I opened it, I found Sadie and her mom, Rhona, standing there. Rhona was carrying a plate layered with freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies. She was so sorry to bother me, she said, but Sadie’s dad had told her I knew about fishing this area, and ever since, his daughter had been insisting she had to come over here and talk to me. Rhona would have called, only their phone hadn’t been turned on yet, and anyway, they didn’t have my number. She was hoping she could offer me a bribe of cookies to answer a couple of her daughter’s questions.

Plus, you want to check out the old man who lives on his own next door, I thought but did not say. I took no umbrage at Rhona’s prudence, which struck me as entirely reasonable. Apologizing for the messiness of my house, which wasn’t that untidy, I held the door wide and invited them in. Sadie’s dad hadn’t been kidding about her passion for fishing. For the next hour and change, she alternated detailed questions as to what varieties of fish I’d hooked in the local waters with accounts of her exploits with the rod and reel in their previous home, in Missouri. Rhona let her daughter ramble on until we’d cleared about half the cookies from the plate, when she announced that it was time for her and Sadie to go, they still had a lot of unpacking to do. Sadie protested, but I told her to mind her ma. I wasn’t going anywhere; we could talk some more later on, once she and her family were properly settled.

As far as these things go, it was a pleasant visit. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed our conversation. Trading stories with Sadie about what we’d caught, and how, and where, it was as if I’d found my way back to the part of my life that had been closed off since that distant Saturday — to speaking about it, anyway. I don’t know if this’ll sound odd, but it was almost like what happened to me after Marie died. For the longest time, talking about her — thinking about her — was an exercise in agony, because I couldn’t separate my wife from the fact of her death. Then, gradually, that stopped being the case. My memory relaxed its grip on Marie’s death; although it felt more as if her dying loosened its hold on me. The myriad of experiences that had composed our time together became available as more than prompts to grief. Her mouth still full of a generous bite of her mother’s cookie, Sadie asked me what kind of catfish swam the waters around here. She intended to catch a catfish in every state in the union, if she could, and since she was living in New York, now, she supposed she should start finding out about its catfish population. Well, I said, the trout was my fish, but I’d pulled my fair share of bullhead and even one or two channel cats out of the Rondout and the Svartkil — and that was that; I was off; I had raced across ice I wasn’t sure would take my weight and it had held.

If I was caught off guard at how easy it had been for me to return to talking about fishing, I was astonished at how simple it proved for me to take it up, again. I didn’t see Sadie or either of her parents the next day, or the one after that, or the one after that, which was Friday. I wasn’t expecting to see any of them, not specifically, but I guess I was waiting to find out what result, if any, our visit would have. Having spoken about fishing once, I found I wanted to do so a second time. When the doorbell rang on Saturday morning, I’ll confess, my pulse gave a jump at the prospect of another chat with Sadie and Rhona.

Instead, I opened the door to Oliver, dressed in his weekend jeans and sweatshirt. He was sorry to bother me at such an earlier hour, he said, but he had promised Sadie he would take her fishing, this morning, and she had asked if they could extend an invitation for me to join them. He’d already warned her I would probably have plans, so there was no problem about me refusing their last-minute request.

I’m pretty sure he was startled by how quickly I said, “Sure — I’d be happy to come along with you.” I know I was, startled but also kind of giddy. The gear I’d bought for my previous try at fishing was in the guest room closet, aside from a little dust as ready to use as it had been seven years earlier. My weekend clothes weren’t any different from those I wore during the week, jeans, a flannel shirt, and work boots. All I needed was a hat, to replace the Yankees cap that had been another casualty of my last trip. After I’d retired, Frank Block and a couple of the other fellows I’d worked with had chipped in to buy me a nice cowboy hat, on account, they said, of how much I loved country music. It was a ridiculous thing, white as toothpaste, that might’ve sat on John Wayne’s head in one of his early westerns. There was nothing else to hand, though, so I grabbed it. Oliver did his best not to laugh at the sight of it, but Sadie declared it cool.

That first trip, I suggested we drive over to the same spot on the Svartkil I’d wound up at when I started fishing. My reasons were more practical than sentimental. That stretch of the river is just downstream from Huguenot’s waste-treatment plant, which in my experience had drawn the catfish on which Sadie had set her sights. I warned her to watch for the trees whose limbs stretched over the water, but she’d noted them and succeeded in staying mostly clear of them, unlike her father, who sacrificed three hooks and a good length of line to the branches above him. I gave most of my attention to helping him work his line from the trees, and to keeping an eye on Sadie, who, as we were preparing to pack up, caught a decent-sized bullhead that I netted for her, almost sliding into the brown water in my haste. I wasn’t overeager to pick up my rod, but there were a couple of times Sadie and Oliver were occupied watching their lines, and I felt conspicuous standing around watching them. While I was aware of the length of years that had passed since I’d last cast a lure, the rod was comfortable in my hand. Before I could overthink it, I snapped my wrist; though I kept my cast short, to where the water wasn’t too deep. Nothing so much as looked at my lure, but that was all right.

Like that, I was back fishing. For the next couple of years, whenever Sadie and Oliver went out in search of fish, they took me with them. Mostly, this was on the weekends, for two or three hours at a time, which was never enough for Sadie. I spent as much of these trips chatting with Oliver as I did with my line in. Oddly enough, he was an IBM’er, and we passed a few hours comparing the company as it was with the company as it had become. I did what I could to broaden their musical horizons, playing Hank Sr. and Johnny Cash for them, but their tastes remained sadly limited. After a couple of seconds, Sadie announced that she had no interest in hillbilly music. Oliver said that his dad used to listen to these guys. When I joined him and Sadie fishing, I let my casts fall close to shore. On more than one occasion, Sadie reproached me for this. “You should cast farther,” she said. “That’s where the big fish are.”

“If I catch all the big ones,” I said, “there won’t be any left for you.”

The snort she gave showed her opinion of that likelihood.

Around us, the twentieth century emptied into the twenty-first, one millennium flowing into another. I’d kept abreast of the news. On the international front, the actors kept replaying the bloody melodrama of genocide, from Bosnia to Rwanda to Kosovo. At home, the dot.com bubble was backdrop for the mad fury of the Oklahoma City bombing and the farce of the Monica Lewinsky affair. I waited up to watch 1999 tick over into 2000, reasonably confident in Oliver’s reassurances concerning the Y2K threat. Eleven months later, the debacle of the 2000 presidential election took over the news, and I found myself reflecting that the aughts were off with more of a whimper than a bang.

The following fall, that changed, the new decade showing its true face in fire and ruin with the destruction of the Twin Towers, the attack on the Pentagon, the crashing of Flight 93. Sadie was twelve, old enough that shielding her from the horrors of that morning was impossible. Her mom taught ninth-grade history at Huguenot High, so I figured she’d have a handle on how to explain the geopolitics that underlay the attacks. The why of it was a bit trickier. Sadie asked me about it the next Saturday, when we walked to the stream behind our houses. Her mom, Sadie told me, said that the terrorists believed they were doing God’s work and would earn themselves a place in heaven. Her dad said they were evil, hateful. From what she could tell, they had to be insane. How about me? she said. What did I think?

I didn’t know, I said. I wasn’t sure I understood enough of all that was involved to speak with any kind of authority about it. But from what I knew at the moment, the best I could tell was, if the men responsible for this carnage intended it for some greater purpose, then their means had hopelessly defiled their ends.

I half-expected Sadie to ask what that meant, but she did not.

The years that followed the attacks, which seemed to echo and amplify their violence, were marked by changes in the weather. The very atmosphere seemed more turbulent, prone to storms that dumped record-setting amounts of rain on us on a regular basis, swelling our neighborhood stream up and over its banks. Could be, the rough weather was part of a larger cycle. If that was the case, then we’d entered the next phase of it, because every few months, it felt like, the local streams and rivers flooded. The Svartkil spread over the fields to the west of Huguenot, forming a great lake which required anyone on its opposite shore who needed to drive to Huguenot to take a considerable detour, turning what should have been a ten- or fifteen-minute trip into an hour-plus trek. My house was situated high enough above the flood plain for me not to be too nervous about the water rolling over it. The principle threat to me came from my little stream, which upon occasion burbled across the field separating it from my place and surrounded me with a good six inches of water. This was how I discovered that my basement had been only partially water-sealed. Fortunately, there wasn’t much of value down there, and Oliver had a wet-vac he loaned me. Sadie suggested I should have left the water in the basement and stocked it with fish. I feigned exasperation with her, but the image of that water remaining under my floorboards made my palms sweat.

What the meteorologists would designate a hundred-year flood occurred three years after my return to fishing. It was mid-October, that point when the warmth that summer lent to autumn is nearing its end. The husk of what had swelled to a Category 4 hurricane as it roared through the Caribbean, but which had worn itself down to a tropical storm as it trudged north through the Carolinas and Virginia, limped into the sky, bringing with it a day and a half of torrential rain and gusting winds that cleaned what leaves remained on the trees from their branches.

Sadie and her family were out of town, driving through the Midwest on a tour of prospective colleges for her older sister. I had assured Oliver and Rhona I’d keep an eye on their place for the eight days they were away, which, since they owned no pets save a goldfish whose tank Sadie had transferred to my kitchen counter, was an easy promise to keep. I collected their mail, and was on hand in case any packages required signing for. (None did.) In the hours prior to the storm’s arrival, I toured their yard, picking up anything that seemed prone to blowing or floating away and carrying it into their garage. I’d already done the same for my place, but after I was finished with theirs, I gave it one last circuit before retiring inside.

I was reasonably well-prepared for what I assumed would be the inevitable loss of power the storm would cause. I had candles in candle-holders stationed in the kitchen, living room, bathroom, and bedroom, with a box of matches set beside each candle. My cupboards were stocked with plenty of non-perishable foodstuffs. There was a stack of library books next to the living room couch and another beside the bed. My transistor radio was running on fresh batteries and I had several unopened packages in reserve. There was nothing to do but wait.

To my surprise, I didn’t lose power at all during the storm. From late Wednesday, throughout the night, until Thursday afternoon, waves of gray clouds, bulled across the sky by the wind, emptied their cargo of rain. The Svartkil climbed its margins and sprawled across the farmland west of Huguenot, submerging the portion of 299 that traversed it, as well as the southern reach of Springvale Road. Water swirled around the farm stand on 299, lifting the pumpkins waiting to be bought for jack-o-lanterns and floating them off in the direction of Wiltwyck. Trees that had been swept into the Svartkil upstream jammed under and then against the bridge out of Huguenot. Closer to home, the stream behind my house spread into a vast shallow lake from which my house and those of my neighbors rose like blocky islands. Between my place and Sadie’s family’s, the water ran a foot deep, except for a dip on my side of their driveway that plunged me to my thighs when I waded over to check their house for flooding. The water was muddy, flowing against and around our houses, spinning the leaves and branches riding its surface off in wide whirlpools. Every so often, an object I hadn’t seen before — a white plastic barrel, a red and gold dragon-kite wrapped around a log, the carcass of a deer, legs stiff and turning up to show its belly bloated and white — floated in front of the living room window, and I watched as it bobbed along, heading east to where the lake that had emerged behind my house slid down a long incline to join the Svartkil. Had Sadie been present, she would have been at my door, her rod and tacklebox in hand, ready to cast off my back porch and see what our luck and the storm brought us. I left my rod undisturbed, preferring the classic western marathon on TCM. I watched John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper deal justice in an arid land, and did what I could to steer my thoughts from what might be swimming the waters outside.

I have to admit, once the rain tapered off, and the wind fell away, and the sun appeared, and my lights were still on, my TV still broadcasting, I sighed with relief. Yes, it would be a good two or three days until the water started to recede; in fact, the chances were, it would rise higher, first, as the flooding upstream pushed its way here. But there was nowhere I had to be, and as long as I had electricity, I could ride out my temporary isolation in comfort.

Which, needless to say, was the exact moment the lights flickered, dimmed, brightened, and went out entirely. I sighed again. At least there was sufficient daylight left for me to make my way through the house, lighting candles. And at least I had my transistor radio, and the college station was playing its bluegrass show. It was the retreating sun, I told myself, that made the water encircling the house appear dark, in places, black.

As a distraction, I started to prepare dinner. At the back door, the portable propane stove I’d purchased for an Adirondack fishing trip that had never happened leaned against the wall. I carried it out onto the porch and opened it on the picnic table. The evening air was tropical. I screwed in the new gas canister I’d picked up the day before yesterday, turned the valves, pressed the starter button, and was rewarded with a puff of blue flame around the burner ring. Leaving the back door open but the screen door closed, I returned inside for the frying pan, the can of cooking spray, and the eggs I planned to scramble. The frying pan was on the stove where I’d left it. I picked it up and set it on the kitchen table. I unsealed the refrigerator long enough to snatch a quartet of eggs from the door and hurried it shut. The eggs I set in the pan. A little cheese would go nicely melted on top of the scrambled eggs, so I reopened the refrigerator door and grabbed a couple of slices of American. The screen door slapped in its frame; the wind, I guessed, shoving it. The cheese slices joined the eggs. All I needed was the cooking spray, but it was not in its usual place, next to the olive oil and the canola oil. The candles glowing on the table rendered the interior of the kitchen almost fuzzy, like in a Rembrandt painting. There was a group of cylinders gathered on the countertop on the other side of the table, cans of spray paint I’d set there in preparation for a touch-up job on the porch I hadn’t found my way to, yet. I crossed the room, and there was the cooking spray, ranked among them. I had no idea what it was doing there.

A half-second, less, before I heard him speak, I registered the presence filling the archway that led to the back door. When he said, “Abe,” I knew it was Dan.

Or something that looked an awful lot like my old friend. Tall, sharp-featured, hair red and curly, he even bore the scar that lined the right side of Dan’s face, descending his neck to halfway down his chest. But his naked skin was a corpse-pale to which the candlelight added no warmth, and his eyes glittered flat and gold as any fish’s. On some floor of my brain, I suppose I must have been anticipating this, dreading it, yet the shock of seeing Dan standing at the entrance to my kitchen like this fell over like a wall of freezing water. Clutching the cooking spray to my chest as if it were some kind of relic, I said, “Dan?”

“The one and only,” he said with a pleasantness that was halfway to snarling.

“What are you doing here?”

“You didn’t think I’d forget about my old fishing buddy, did you? My old pal,” he said, bringing teeth that suddenly appeared sharp as a barracuda’s together on the last l.

“Dan,” I said.

“Oh, don’t worry, Abe: there’s no hard feelings,” he said. “At first, there were. There were a lot of hard feelings. I have to tell you. You can’t go through what I did and not emerge from it feeling a tad ornery. You were there for part of it; you can understand. If I could have come to you then…

“But that’s all in the past, isn’t it? I am what I’ve become, and you — you’ve gone back to fishing, haven’t you? With that family next door, that cute little girl. Not much chance of her trying to sacrifice you to an undying wizard, is there?”

“What is it you want?” I said. “Why are you here, now?”

“I’ve been close to you before,” Dan said, “you have no idea. But you’re right: this is different. The storm that’s just passed has widened the crack that leads to this place. With the situation this fluid — sorry — I couldn’t resist paying you a visit.”

“If I’d known you were coming—”

“You’d have baked a cake?”

“I was going to say, I’d have baited a hook.”

Dan’s brows lowered, his mouth rippling, filling with curved fangs that retreated a moment later. “You did this to me,” he said when his mouth was clear. “What I am is the work of your hand.”

Unexpected, a wave of pity threatened to swamp me. I swallowed it. “What you are is the result of your own actions,” I said. “Now get out.”

“It’s not that easy,” Dan said. “I’ve come a long way to see you, Abe, an unbelievably long way. You can’t ask me to turn away the second after I arrive.”

“I don’t believe the rules of hospitality apply to monsters,” I said.

“Abe,” Dan said, his face shimmering, another, inhuman one coming into view, “you’re starting to hurt my feelings.”

“Dan,” I said, “go.”

Whatever words he was trying to pronounce, he was having difficulty forcing through the fangs jutting from his mouth. His speech had become guttural, a harsh, grating noise that rasped against my ears. My vision wavered, and for an instant, something threatened to come into view, a huge shape that was somehow in the same place as Dan. He stepped into the kitchen, raising a hand whose fingertips had sprouted claws. I held the can of cooking spray out from me and depressed the button on its top. A narrow cone of pressurized oil hissed across the room at him. On its way, it touched the tops of the candles on the table and blossomed into a tongue of fire. Yellow and orange flame wreathed Dan’s torso and head. Shrieking, he stumbled backwards, while I emptied the rest of my improvised flame-thrower at him. Light and heat filled the kitchen. I threw my arm up to shield my face, feeling around the counter with my free hand for something else to spray through the candles at him.

I needn’t have bothered. Arms flailing, Dan ran from the house, out the screen door, and onto the porch, from which he vaulted into the surrounding water. Although I would have sworn it could not have been any more than one or two feet deep, the water swallowed him whole, sending up a great, hissing column of foul-smelling smoke where he’d entered. I’d followed close on his heels, a can of spray paint I hoped was flammable in my hand. When he did not resurface, I set it down on the porch and, suddenly dizzy to the point of fainting, slumped against the outside of the house. For what could have been a long time, I remained there, my heart galloping, my head full of white noise.

After my pulse had settled to a trot, I pushed myself to standing. The burner on the portable stove was still on. Absurdly, I was starving, but I crossed the porch and turned the gas off. I paused, surveying the flat reach of dark water behind my house for further signs of Dan. There were none I could see.

Which did not mean the water was empty. On the contrary, as my eyes adjusted to the early evening, I saw that the water was full of objects, crowded with shapes whose details my vision was on the verge of deciphering, until it did, and what I recognized had me in the house, the back door closed and me locking it. For the rest of the night, I stayed in the upstairs bedroom with the door locked and the bed and dresser pushed against it. I didn’t sleep. The next morning, when the Sheriff’s deputies pulled up in their boat to offer me the choice of rescue, I leapt onboard with tears in my eyes, which I let them attribute to my age. What I saw out there in the water set me to wrestling with this story, with the strange, knotted length of it. I’m not sure what else is left for me to do with it, except tell you what I saw in the water.

People — rows and rows of people floated there, most of them submerged to their shoulders, a few to their chins, fewer still to their eyes. I couldn’t guess their number, because they extended into the deeper dark. Their skin was damp, white, their hair lank, their eyes gleaming gold. It didn’t take me long to pick out Marie in the midst of them, not as close as I would have supposed. Her face was blank, as were those of the children to either side of her. A girl and a boy, their features in that in-between stage when childhood is beginning to make way for adolescence. Their mouths were open; I glimpsed rows of serrated teeth. Their eyes were vacant of any intelligence. They had, I fancied, my mother’s nose.

THE END