“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.