The Hauntings of Hood Canal

The Fisherman and the Creature

Along about dawn when local delivery guys checked their loads against their routes, and when newspaper guys dropped copies of the Daily Blat onto counters of self-serves, or in boxes before restaurants, a Canal story worked its way north from Olympia.

The story said a gang war raged north of Beer and Bait. Survivors were even now carried through doorways of hospital emergency rooms. The war was fought with knives, clubs, insults, cuss words, accusations; plus tire irons, shotguns, slingshots; all the usual stuff, plus a secret freezer-zapper that floated ten feet above the ground and, instantaneous, turned guys into corpsecicles.

News of the war erupted when a cop and a fish-guy showed up in emergency, totally froze out, and not saying squat. The cop made a deathbed confession, then a minimum recovery because of a prayer session with an itinerant missionary. The confession indicted every cop and every preacher in three counties.

Because a plot was afoot to a: dump speeding tickets in return for church attendance, b: make DWI a Class-A felony, c: raze every joint along the Canal and build rich-guy condominiums in a grand cleanup of bums, deadbeats, goldbricks, freeloaders, fornicators, hustlers, and honest men.

By midmorning, when the fisherman slept exhausted across his truck seat while waiting for China Bay to open, the story reached Rough and Randy where guys toasted a wind-blown day with hair-of-the-dog, and watched each other with suspicion. Talk stayed at a minimum. Mental inventories of weapons, tactical plans, and deep, deep, deep, deep holes for hiding lay on the surface of each and every mind. If a war went on somewhere, no one could say the men of Rough and Randy were not prepared.

And, at Beer and Bait, Bertha swept floors, polished mirrors, stocked cold cases, and poured coffee while listening to one crock after the next. Guys played at being brave. They hovered above steaming cups and passed the creamer.

If a gang war was goin’ on out there, where were the cops? And was it a good idea to get back on that road or what? Plus, the bull said, another car had gone in. Men talked in low voices as they pretended not to listen for gunfire; but if sounds of battle went on, the sounds were carried away by wind.

At China Bay, the fisherman slept in his truck as the bartender arrived, cleaned the joint, and got set for the day’s business. The fisherman kept sleeping heavy-duty, like after a twenty-hour stretch at sea… it having been one helluva night… drive to Olympia with a badly injured cop who was hurt lots worse than it first seemed… and himself feeling broken and old… and both of them so scared they could hardly talk… catch a return ride north for his truck, then drive back to Olympia where he could be near hospital and bartender; all with a hand that was gonna gangrene if blood didn’t start pumping pretty quick.

A dreadful dream woke him at noon. He dreamed of the cop and Sugar Bear, and coldness, and eternal night. He dreamed of his face reflected in the truck’s mirrors, of wrinkles and seams, eye-pouches of age. He dreamed of the depths of the sea, and of a missionary voice, almost familiar and echoing from the bottom of the Canal, or maybe from a hospital waiting room. He heard the swish and flow of dark creatures moving monstrous above drowned men, monsters feeding on the fleeing souls of men. Impressions and memories mixed in the dream, and all through the dream sounded pain and darkness.

He woke to twenty knots of wind. And, when he woke he looked in the truck mirror and saw the face of nightmare, a face aged and aging moreso as he watched.

The parking lot displayed a lunchtime crowd, dink-commute-cars belonging to government jocks who packed in one beer, or maybe two, max, before tightening ties and heading back to make rules that molested suffering humanity. Plus, work trucks were sprinkled among the econo-boxes. A hefty crew of poolers had come aboard. The bartender’s Jag sat in quiet, if rumpled, splendor.

When the fisherman stepped inside he saw all pool tables busy with guys practicing. He figured they clustered at China Bay, because Beer and Bait would already be crowded with folks arriving for tournament. He saw lunch tables surrounded by bureaucrats stuffing with gobbled cold cuts while sipping beer. He saw two retired gents playing cribbage at the fish tank end of the bar. One was the tattooed ex-Navy guy, the other the former diplomat with the pressed hanky.

Lee was nowhere seen, but the bartender stood behind a bar that was pretty near deserted. The fisherman took a seat three stools down from the old gents, and two stools away from a well­-dressed, well-coifed, and very slender lady who sipped white wine and looked emotionally satisfied.

The bartender placed coffee before the fisherman, then, being either charitable or interested, waited.

“It’s worse than serious,” the fisherman said, “but you know about that.” His voice trembled. He cleared his throat. Then, because he didn’t really believe bartenders know everything, he told it anyway: How the dark creation had appeared, and how it acted. How maybe he would never pull a line again, because his right hand wouldn’t close. He tried to talk calm about it, at least as calm as the cop had tried for.

And he told how, a cop, a guy he feared, turned into a good guy after all; and was maybe going to live. How, it seemed like something dark tried to crawl all over the cop, and how the cop had stayed mostly brave and quiet. How, no matter what, living or dead, the guy was done, hurt, looking older than old; and how doctors in emergency, doctors who saw every kind of bad thing, had been afraid and not hiding it when they found a completely dead arm on a living body.

Wind slapped the windows of China Bay, and the fisherman told how coldness, like no cold he had ever known in a life spent at sea, still deadened his fingers. He rushed with his words until fear choked him. He fell silent. Beyond the windows, water broke in gusts of froth and wind-blown spray around a hump that moved slowly on the Canal; but no one seemed to notice.

“It’s little known,” one of the retired gents said, his voice completely sympathetic as he studiously avoided inquisitiveness, “why Europeans prefer hairy armpits. In actual fact, they’ve been civilized for so long that wild armpits are all they’ve got left of nature.” The gent moved a peg three jumps. “I speak, of course, of the more northerly latitudes.” This was the former diplomat, who sometimes seemed as wry as the bartender.

The bartender’s eyes, sort of hazel, showed interest in the fisherman. “You speak of dark power, yet it runs away?”

“It’s getting stronger,” the fisherman said. “Like it gets stronger every time it wins something, and weaker when something happens it can’t handle. It attacked a cop and went smaller before a dog.”

“Bingo,” the bartender whispered, and could barely be heard above bureaucratic chatter and the click of pool. “It feeds. Think of what it feeds on. Because it can’t handle natural forces.” The bartender turned to draw beer for an approaching gov-guy. “Third one today,” the bartender told the guy.

“Like I give-a-…” the guy looked toward the satisfied slim lady who paid no attention. “My car is paid for, I got no wife or kids, so do I give a… rap?”

“Unemployment insurance,” the other retired gent mentioned, “is not actually a creature of the New Deal as is generally supposed.” He kept his eyes lowered, so as not to embarrass the fisherman. Discreet for a Navy man.

“I had a ten-year career plan,” the gov-guy said. “I’m reducing the sucker to three more beers and fifteen minutes.” He looked toward the satisfied lady who paid absolutely no attention.

The fisherman sipped coffee, awkward, his bad hand resting on the bar, his left hand fumbling the cup. “The docs didn’t want me to leave, but I can still shift gears. Hang the wrist over the shift, or come up from under.’ He heard tears in his voice but wasn’t shedding any, not yet. He imagined that coldness was moving up his wrist.

“Poor, dear, John,” the satisfied lady said when the gov-guy departed. “He’s ridden that slippery slope since the moment he championed public transit.” The lady’s delicate wrist curved as she sipped from her wine glass. To the bartender she said, “Odd people infest this bar. You’ll surely lose business.” She wrinkled her nose as she glanced at the fisherman, looked at his hand.

“There appears to be a problem,” the bartender mentioned.

“One spends one’s days with important problems,” the lady said, “and wishes to relax at lunch.”

The retired diplomat who knew about Europeans, and who was conscious of bad, bad trouble, chuckled. He turned to the lady. “My dear, if you lose a couple pounds and do a little something with your hair… what an improvement would come to your sympathies.”

“That,” said the lady most grimly, “was crude, sexual, filled with filth, and amounts to harassment.” She barely kept control, and clearly thought of body fat.

Wind popped in gusts against the windows, gusts that maybe hit twenty knots.

“We will now take a short break,” the bartender told everyone. “Each and all will think charitable thoughts. Your happiness is at stake.” The bartender did not explain, and did not have to.

“It grows when it steals life,” the fisherman murmured, mostly to himself. “It’s creating itself out of what it kills.”

“For the moment,” the bartender said, “let us put an end to this. You are sorely ridden.” The bartender touched the fisherman’s hand. “You are a man of the sea,” the bartender said, “perhaps your answer is on the water, which is where you should now go.”

The fisherman felt the tiniest tingle on one fingertip, felt a small pain in a knuckle; like the fishy-type arthritis that flogs hands in cold-weather fishing. “I do gotta go,” he said, knowing he would choke up and act stupid if he stayed. He left quickly, but not so quickly he forgot to say “thanks,” or leave a buck for the coffee. When he stepped outside, wind still gusted around twenty.

It blew that way as he drove north, slowed by increasingly heavy traffic as people headed for Beer and Bait. Wind continued to blow as he arrived at his home pier and got underway. His workboat carried a downeast bow that threw large spray into the wind.

The fisherman fumbled the throttle and told himself he was the luckiest man afloat. Pain flashed across his fingertips, burned his wrist and contorted his palm as the hand returned to life. It hung hooked, crooked, a claw; and maybe it would never completely close again, but a guy could re-rig the winch for working line. The hand trembled a good bit, but that might go away. He watched the hand, saw no black streaks, nothing blue or purple. Calluses flaked off, the way it does after a month ashore. Working hands, and it looked like, one way or other, they would keep working if a guy was not too feeble.

He did not know where to go or what he looked for. If answers were out here, they would have to come to him. He kept the engine running at half, the boat moving slowly into the chop, splitting waves and casting them, white and foam, above black water.

For the third time, if a guy counted the nightmare that had waked him, the fisherman thought of the depths beneath his keel. He thought of darkness and of discarded things, of darkness and the death of men; thus the death of dreams. He thought of stuff sailors don’t think about, or else wear survival suits so they can think about it.

Beneath him, even lower down than the wreckage of modern boats and airplanes, of beer cans and discarded appliances, lay prehistoric bones, Indian villages, ancient echoes of lives lived and lost, century after century after century.

How much junk, he wondered, had cluttered around the ruins of Atlantis? How many busted bowls and worn-out olive presses clustered around sunken temples in Greece, Italy; how many bones of oxen lay in the muds of Burma? The sea gets it all. Eventually.

But was it the sea? Because the sea is indifferent. When worlds come apart, the sea does not care. And so it must be that Something… Something even uglier than spite… caused the clutter that overlays the fall of nations.

Wind kicked so hard he kept ten degrees left rudder to hold a straight course against the easterly. A dark sky pressed close, and only whitecaps told where wind and water met. He pointed toward the middle of the channel. Water in the middle looked flattened, but showed turmoil beneath the surface. It moved beneath winds different from the easterly.

He suddenly sailed into a place of calm, but not calm in the eye of storm. Temperature raised, hot and dry, heat that cracks rock, and sunlight that ennobles marble. Wind fell to a breeze, and carried the scent of islands, olive trees, and markets. Wind carried sounds of creaking from slowly turning windmills, their sails white beneath the sun. Wind carried the murmur of voices in hurry-scurry of trade, and wind carried other voices, calm, stating syllogism, stating enthymeme. And, lying like the foundation of the world, a crystal sea lapped against distant shores while fish of kinds he did not know flashed across the sea floor.

The fisherman slowed the engine, stopped, listened, waited. Fishing boats of a curious style were silhouetted on the horizon. A distant island glowed, a distant temple white against a sky of Mediterranean blue. The workboat drifted nearly without movement.

In the near distance, and closing as though tired, water swirled where a hump moved beneath the surface. The fisherman knew he should feel alarm, yet did not. As the creature closed, water gave a final swirl, then the surface went calm. Somewhere close the creature moved beneath a sunlit sea.

The fisherman automatically checked for ocean traffic and saw he need not worry about interruptions. He peered into deep and sunlit water. An old face peered back, his own, but now with more wrinkles, and with skin thin and stretched tight across bone. At first he did not recognize himself. Then he choked, sobbing. He wondered how old he was, if he was old as he looked. Then he commanded himself to stop blubbering.

His attention went to movement as the seafloor disappeared. At first he believed he sailed across the shadowed mouth of a cavern, one so huge it could swallow ships. Then he understood it was not a cavern but an eye. He waited. Watched. Waited.

The creature drifted beneath him, wounded, decrepit; its immortality no guard against disease and crippling, no guard against all ill things; except death.

It drifted, mountainous in sunlight, larger than temples, as large, even, as ideas. It glowed pale in places, luminescent in others; and with much of it hidden because it was huge and not alone. The fisherman thought of an island cruising beneath water, an island invaded by frenzied beings. Myriad creatures hovered, darted, swarmed, and fed on the luminescence; not a frenzy of feeding, but steadily, unhurried; grotesque creatures, unnatural, not exactly flesh and not exactly rock. Not exactly iron or bronze or wire; nebulous, ugly forms of spines and hooks and mouths; flashing, darting, black and red and blue and purple, flashes of pink, white, the color spectrum lacking green. Fins, snakelike, many mouths. Low sounds seemed to rise through water where they swarmed, sounds of chatter, mindless, babbling as they fed.

Immortality. The fisherman, who was not nearly as tough as he pretended, peered through crystal water and understood that life needs an ending. He imagined himself immortal, imagined the unending days, while all around him friends and lovers and even enemies stepped into eternity.

He thought of change, and how true things get discarded generation after generation: asking himself what did this creature know, remember; what part of this creature’s wisdom had the world cast off as it giggled its way from amusement to amusement? This crippled thing, alive after twenty-five hundred years, now eternally gnawed, eternally old.

The creature moved slowly in a wide arc, rising little by little until it hung suspended at four fathoms. As it rose further, the chatter from feeding things became screeches, and the fisherman understood that the creature lived in a world of mindless sound.

It hovered, the part he could see, just beneath his keel. Its immensity and paleness, its luminosity, spread across the sea and made crystal water glow bloodless. It rested among noise, or else it waited. Waited.

“I would help you if I could.” The fisherman did not know what else to say. Waited. It seemed to him that noise diminished, but only a trifle. It seemed the gnawing slowed, but only a trifle.

The creature rose, nearly on the surface, and the fisherman thought his workboat would go aground. As the creature neared, the swarm of feeders dropped lower, still chattering, but avoiding the surface. It came to the fisherman that the creature had been alone, except for feeders, a very, very long time. The fisherman reached over the side, prepared to touch.

“I don’t understand,” the fisherman said. “Maybe you don’t need help, but I would if I could.” He sensed that something was about to happen, some communication. The noise of feeding diminished, only a little. Then startlement ran though the water, like a sea animal hit by harpoon.

He watched as the creature sank slowly into depths; then, quicker than the quickest fish or gull, spun and drove away while the sunlit sea turned darker. Water erupted, as from an underwater explosion, and the fisherman told himself nothing so huge could move so quickly, yet it did. The work boat heeled before the explosive wave, then settled onto a sea going black, like a slow fade-out in artsy movies. Distant islands and temple slowly disappeared as the workboat began to rock.

Wind kicked the workboat. Canal wind and Canal water crashed, and low clouds blew as mist. Sudden chill dwelt in the wind, and cold rose from the water. In the distance a hump closed the westward shore, moving toward the dunk site. The fisherman ported his helm, spun toward the west and opened the engine full. Wind pressed his starboard quarter, wind rising in a sudden squall bringing spume over the low rail of the boat. Whatever was happening must be happening fast. The boat kicked and stumbled through chop. Wind crashed from starboard.

Wind gusted from gale to storm. Along the shore, explosions of water rose, salt spray blowing across the road and into forest.

The fisherman cut r.p.m.s, felt the stern slide sideways, increased r.p.m.s and spun the bow to wind. He held it there and looked backward to the shore.

Dim figures moved as the forest went dark. Two people or maybe three, and two of them running. Near the shore a battle began. Water rose like geysers, paused, rose, spouted, paused, exploded. Enormous movement, challenge, fight. Waves kicked back from the shore, beat against waves blown shoreward by wind. A turmoil of water crashed before the fisherman’s bow. Water rose high into the wind, was blown into the forest. Then, almost as quickly as it began, the battle stilled before a screaming wind. Whatever happened beneath the waves had happened.

The fisherman, who knew with awful certainty that he must get to Sugar Bear, imagined two exhausted and deadly enemies resting on the bottom among detritus of broken planes, castoff junk, the bones of men, and beer cans; the two enemies no doubt also broken. Why enemies? Why battle?

He unwillingly accepted, though, that nothin’ down there was dead. There was only continuation of tortured life.