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.