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.