It’s a fishhook. It’s a couple of inches long, no different from what you might tie to the end of your line. The metal is tarnished, crusted with a dark substance that Lottie would tell you is her late husband’s blood. This is the hook that stuck into Jacob’s cheek, right below his eye, when his axe severed the Fisherman’s line and the power it contained burst outwards, spraying the hooks that had dangled from it in all directions. So stunned and exhausted from that adventure had Jacob been that he had walked to the bunkhouse and collapsed onto his bed with the hook lodged in his flesh. The next day, he awakened with his cheek swollen and painful. A bunkmate pulled the hook free, releasing a pocket of pus and blood and leaving Jacob with a small white scar. Jacob kept the hook folded in a handkerchief. Once Lottie learned of its existence, she asked for the hook, which Jacob presented to her in the jewelry box. She’ll pinch it between her thumb and index finger and hold it up to the light. She’ll do the same for the Reverend Mapple, near the end of her long life and at the end of the fantastic tale she’s told him. He’ll squint at the curved bit of metal in her fingers, its surface patterned with the blood of a man long dead, its barbed point still sharp.
Part 3: On the Shore of the Black Ocean
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.