The Fisherman Read online

  Contents

  Critical Acclaim for John Langan's The Fisherman

  The Fisherman

  Other Books by John Langan

  The Fisherman

  Frontmatter

  Dedication

  Epigram

  Part 1: Men Without Women

  I: How Fishing Saved My Life

  II: Rungs on the Ladder of Loss

  III: At Herman’s Diner

  Part 2: Der Fischer: A Tale of Terror

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  Part 3: On the Shore of the Black Ocean

  IV: Words Read by Traffic Light

  V: There Fissure

  VI: Hundred-Year Flood

  Acknowledgments

  Titles Available from Word Horde

  About the Author

  Critical Acclaim for

  John Langan’s The Fisherman

  “The Fisherman is an epic, yet intimate, horror novel. Langan channels M. R. James, Robert E. Howard, and Norman Maclean. What you get is A River Runs Through It…Straight to hell.”

  —Laird Barron, author of X’s for Eyes

  “Stories within stories, folk tales becoming modern legends, all spinning into a fisherman’s tale about the one he wishes had gotten away. Langan’s latest is at turns epic and personal, dense yet compulsively readable, frightening but endearing. Already among the year’s very best dark fiction releases.”

  —Adam Cesare, author of The Con Season and Zero Lives Remaining

  “In this painful, intimate portrait of loss, two damaged men take steps toward redemption, until the discovery of an obscure legend suggests a dangerous alternative. Can men so broken resist the temptation to veer away into strange, unfamiliar geographies? The Fisherman is a masterful, chilling tale, aching with desire and longing for the impossible.”

  —Michael Griffin, author of The Lure of Devouring Light

  “Reading this, your mouth fills with worms. Just let them wriggle and crawl as they will, though—don’t swallow. John Langan is fishing for your sleep, for your soul. I fear he’s already got mine.”

  —Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels

  “John Langan’s The Fisherman isn’t about fishing at all. Yes, there’s fishing in it, but it’s really about friendship, loss, and bone-deep horror. What starts as a slow, melancholy tale gains momentum and drops you head first into a churning nightmare from which you might escape, but you’ll never forget, and the memory of what you saw will change you forever.”

  —Richard Kadrey, author of The Everything Box

  “Whenever John Langan publishes a book I am going to devour that book. That’s because he’s one of the finest practitioners of the moody tale working today. The Fisherman is a treasure, the kind of book you just want to snuggle up and shiver through. I can’t say enough good things about the confidence, the patience, the satisfying cumulative power of this book. It was a pleasure to read from the first page to the last.”

  —Victor LaValle, author of The Ballad of Black Tom

  “A haunting novel about loss and friendship, The Fisherman is a monstrous catch in the sea of weird fiction.”

  —Cameron Pierce, author of Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon

  “For some fishing is a therapeutic, a way to clear one’s head, to chase away the noise of a busy world and focus on one single thing. On good days it can heal the worst pains, even help develop a sense of solace. John Langan’s The Fisherman isn’t about the good day fishing, it isn’t even about a bad day fishing, it’s about the day that you shouldn’t have even left the house, let alone waded chest deep into a swollen stream of churning water. Langan tells you that up front, warns you this isn’t going to be that story, but you ignore the signs, lured in by the faint smell of masculine adventure, hooked by tragedy and the chance of redemption, and reeled in by a nesting tale of ever growing horrors. By the time you realize what has happened it’s already too late, you’re caught in an unavoidable net of terror that can end in only one way. It doesn’t matter how strong you are or how prepared, John Langan has you hook, line and sinker, and he doesn’t let go until the very last page.”

  —Pete Rawlik, author of Reanimatrix

  “John Langan’s The Fisherman is literary horror at its sharpest and most imaginative. It’s at turns a quiet and powerfully melancholy story about loss and grief; the impossibility of going on in the same manner as you had before. It’s also a rollicking, kick-ass, white-knuckle charge into the winding, wild, raging river of redemption. Illusory, frightening, and deeply moving, The Fisherman is a modern horror epic. And it’s simply a must read.”

  —Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts

  and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock.

  The

  Fisherman

  Other Books by John Langan

  Novels

  House of Windows

  Collections

  Sefira and Other Betrayals

  The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies

  Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters

  The

  Fisherman

  John Langan

  Word Horde

  Petaluma, CA

  The Fisherman © 2016 by John Langan

  This edition of The Fisherman

  © 2016 by Word Horde

  Cover: “Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast, 1870”, by Albert Bierstadt

  Cover design by Scott R Jones

  All rights reserved

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-939905-21-5

  A Word Horde Book

  http://www.WordHorde.com

  For Fiona.

  Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? …

  — the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like willful travelers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

  —Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  Part 1

  Men Without Women

  I

  How Fishing Saved My Life

  Don’t call me Abraham: call me Abe. Though it’s what my ma named me, I’ve never liked Abraham. It’s a name that sounds so full of itself, so Biblical, so…I believe patriarchal is the word I’m after. One thing I am not, nor do I want to be, is a patriarch. There was a time I thought I’d like at least one child, but these days, the sight of them makes my skin crawl.

  Some years ago, never mind how many, I started to fish. I’ve been fishing for a long time, now, and as you might guess, I know a story or two. That’s what fishermen are, right? Storytellers. Some I’ve lived; some I’ve had from the mouths of others. Most of them are funny; they bring a smile to your face and sometimes a laugh, which are no small things. A bit of laughter can be the bridge that lets you c
ross out of a bad time, believe you me. Some of my stories are what I’d call strange. I know only a few of these, but they make you scratch your head and maybe give you a little shiver, which can be a pleasure in its own way.

  But there’s one story—well, it’s downright awful, almost too much to be spoken. It happened going on ten years ago, on the first Saturday in June, and by the time night had fallen, I’d lost a good friend, most of my sanity, and damn near my life. I’d come whisker-close to losing more than all that, too. It stopped me fishing for the better part of a decade, and although I’ve returned to it once again, there’s no power on earth, or under it, could bring me back to the Catskill Mountains, to Dutchman’s Creek, the place a man I should have listened to called “Der Platz das Fischer.”

  You can find the creek on your map if you look closely. Go to the eastern tip of the Ashokan Reservoir, up by Woodstock, and backtrack along the south shore. It may take you a couple of tries. You’ll see a blue thread snaking its way from near the Reservoir over to the Hudson, running north of Wiltwyck. That was where it all happened, though what it all was I still can’t wrap my head around. I can tell you only what I heard, and what I saw. I know Dutchman’s Creek runs deep, much deeper than it could or should, and I don’t like to think what it’s full of. I’ve walked the woods around it to a place you won’t find on your map, on any map you’d buy in the gas station or sporting-goods store. I’ve stood on the shore of an ocean whose waves were as black as the ink trailing from the tip of this pen. I’ve watched a woman with skin pale as moonlight open her mouth, and open it, and open it, into a cavern set with rows of serrated teeth that would have been at home in a shark’s jaws. I’ve held an old knife out in front of me in one, madly trembling hand, while a trio of refugees from a nightmare drew ever-closer.

  I’m running ahead of myself, though. There’s other things you’ll need to hear about first, like Dan Drescher, poor, poor Dan, who went with me up to the Catskills that morning. You’ll need to hear Howard’s story, which makes far more sense to me now than it did when first he delivered it to me in Herman’s Diner. You’ll need to hear about fishing, too. Everything’ll have to be in its proper place. If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s a poorly put-together story. A story doesn’t have to be fitted like some kind of pre-fabricated house—no, it’s got to go its own way—but it does have to flow. Even a tale as coal-black as this one has its course.

  You may ask why I’m taking such care. Some things are so bad that just to have been near them taints you, leaves a spot of badness in your soul like a bare patch in the forest where nothing will grow. Do you suppose a story can carry away such badness? It seems a bit much to hope for, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s true for the little wrongs, you know, the kind of minor frustrations that you’re able to turn into funny stories at parties. For what happened at the Creek, though, I doubt there’s such a transformation waiting. There’s only transmission.

  And there’s more to it than that. There’s the tale Dan and I heard in Herman’s Diner. Since Howard told what happened to Lottie Schmidt and her family, some ninety years past, I’ve been unable to shake it. You could say his words stuck with me, which would be the understatement of the year. I can recall that tale word for word, as could Howard from the minister who told it to him. Without a doubt, part of the reason for the vividness of my memory is the way that Howard’s story seems to explain a good deal of what happened to Dan and me later that same day. That tale about the building of the Reservoir and who—and what—was covered by its waters, prowls my brain. Even had we heeded Howard’s advice and avoided the creek that day—Hell, had we turned around and headed back home as fast as I could drive, which is what we should have done—I’m convinced what we heard would still have branded itself on my memory. Can a story haunt you? Possess you? There are times I think recounting the events of that Saturday in June is just an excuse for those more distant events to make their way out into the world once more.

  Again, though, I’m running ahead of myself. There will be a time and a place for everything, including the story of Lottie Schmidt, her father, Rainer, and the man he called Der Fischer. Let’s back it all up. Let’s begin with a few words about my life’s great passion—well, what I used to think of as my life’s great passion: a few words about fishing.

  It wasn’t something I’d learned as a child. My pa took me once or twice, but he wasn’t much good at it himself, so he concentrated on teaching me the things he knew, like baseball, and the guitar. One day, it must have been twenty-five, thirty years after pa and I had spent our final Saturday morning subjecting a bucketful of worms to protracted drowning, I woke up and thought, I’d like to go fishing. Scratch that. I woke up and thought, I need to go fishing. I needed it the deep-down way you need that tall glass of water with the ice cubes clinking around in it at three o’clock on a blistering July afternoon. Why I needed fishing, of all things, I don’t know and can’t say. Granted, I was at a bit of a rough patch. My wife had just died, and us married not two years, and I was living the clichés you watch in made-for-TV movies and listen to in country songs. Mostly, this meant drinking too much, and since pa wasn’t much with the liquor, either, this meant drinking badly, half a bottle of Scotch followed by half a bottle of wine, followed by extended sessions of holding onto the toilet as the bathroom did a merry dance around me. My job had gone all to hell, too—I was a systems analyst over at IBM in Poughkeepsie—although I was fortunate in having a manager who put me in for extended sick leave, instead of firing my ass, which is what I deserved. This was back when IBM was a decent place to work. The company approved three months with pay, if you can believe it. Almost the entire first month I spent looking up out of the bottoms of more bottles than I could count. I ate when I thought about it, which wasn’t too often, and my meals were basically a steady stream of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches interrupted by the occasional burger and fries. The second month was pretty much the same as the first, except for visits from my brother and my late wife’s parents, none of which went well enough to bother relating. All of us were suffering. Marie had been something else, like no other girl. We felt her loss the way you’d feel it if someone reached into the back of your mouth with a pair of pliers and tore out one of your molars; it was an open wound that ached all the way through you. The same way you couldn’t stop testing that spot where your tooth used to be, probing it with your tongue until you felt the jolt of pain, none of us could help poking around our memories until we made everything start hurting all over again. By the time the third month was half done, I was sitting in my underwear on the couch with the TV on, sipping from whatever was closest to hand. I had learned a little, you see.

  I had these shoeboxes full of photos I’d never gotten around to placing in albums, and when the alcohol in my blood hit the right level, I would fetch those boxes from the bedroom closet and surround myself with the archive of my marriage. Here was Marie when I’d first met her—when I first talked to her, I should say, since we’d been introduced at work at the beginning of the summer, when she’d joined the company right out of college. We were connected to two of the same projects, so we saw each other in passing throughout July and August, though we didn’t pass more than a couple of pleasantries back and forth at any one time. That September, there was a Labor Day party at someone’s house—I want to say Tim Stoffel’s—and we wound up sitting next to one another at one of the card tables set up around the yard. Marie had come with Jenny Barnett, but Jenny had disappeared with Steve Collins, and of the remaining party goers, I was the one she knew the best. She always denied it, but I’m reasonably sure that, when she asked me how I was doing, she was just killing time until she could finish her plate and make for home. You’d expect that conversation would be burned into my brain, but damned if I can remember much more than the pleasure of learning she was a fan of Hank Williams, Sr., too. Truth to tell, I was too busy trying not to pay too close attention to the bikini top she was wearing with a pair o
f cut-off shorts and tennis shoes. Typical guy, I know. We sat there talking until Tim was standing on the opposite side of the card table from us, telling us we didn’t have to go home, but we couldn’t stay here. We did go home—I mean, each of us went to our own home—but our time together had left me with a feeling—once we’d gone our separate ways, everything seemed a bit less bright than it had while we were sitting together.

  Even so, an hour or two of pleasant talk does not guarantee anything, and I might never have come into possession of that photograph Jenny had taken of Marie, her hair done up in a single ponytail, her eyes and a good portion of the rest of her face concealed by a pair of enormous sunglasses, the yellow and white straps of that swimsuit top making her summer’s tan look darker still. I had a good fifteen years on her, and that was sufficient distance to keep me cautious about what I thought I’d felt between us. I’d like to say my hesitation owed itself to not wanting to harass a woman young enough to be my niece, if not my daughter, but it had as much to do with my fear of looking the fool. “No fool worse’n’ an old fool,” my pa used to say, and although I hardly considered myself old, set next to Marie, I wasn’t exactly what you’d call fresh off the rack.

  Another photo, and I leapt ahead to the following spring. Marie and I were standing knee-deep in a stream—well, it was knee-deep for me; for her, it was more like thigh-high. One of her friends had invited us to spend the day in the Catskills, where said friend’s brother had a weekend place that turned out to be nicer than I was expecting. It was located halfway up a tall, rolling hill, along a gravel road you had to ease your car over if you didn’t want to tear out the undercarriage. From the outside, the place resembled an abbreviated barn, taller than it was long. Inside, new wooden surfaces, stainless steel appliances, and a stone fireplace gathered under a cathedral ceiling and a loft. Apparently, the place had been built by a Manhattan lawyer who’d had to divest himself of it shortly after its completion; whereupon Marie’s friend’s brother, who worked for the Post Office, had picked it up for the proverbial song, and not a terribly long one, at that. We arrived at lunchtime, and passed one of the more pleasant afternoons of my life wandering further up the gravel road with Marie’s friend, whose name, I’m reasonably sure, was Karen. They had grown up beside one another. After maybe a mile, the road crossed a wide meadow, at the far side of which, a line of trees marked the course of a stream. It was a hot day, the air heavy with the sun, and the shade of the trees, the surprising cold of the water, were too much to resist. We tied our sneakers around our necks, and waded in. The stream bed was rocky, so you had to step carefully. Karen walked with both hands held up, as if she were expecting to fall at any moment. Marie stayed close enough to me that she could reach out to steady herself if necessary. I can’t recall what we talked about. What I remember is staring at the water’s surface, at those little bugs that skate across it—water-skimmers? Funny, I don’t know their proper name. There were dozens of them, sliding over the stream in a way that made its top seem more solid than my legs pushing through it told me it was. In the murk beneath them, trout whose size would have beggared their insect imaginations flitted amongst the rocks. Every now and again, a plop and a spreading ripple of rings would show where a water-skimmer had found himself swallowed by a great black cavern. I don’t suppose we waded more than a hundred yards downstream until we came in sight of a small dam. What we could see of it through the skin of water pouring over it showed it old, but there was nothing on the banks on either side of it to explain how or why it had come to be placed there. It seemed a reasonable spot to turn around, head back to the cookout Karen’s brother was preparing, but before we did, Karen snapped a picture of Marie and me in the stream. Her hair’s down in this one, and she’s wearing an oversized tie-dye that she’d found in one of my drawers and that had struck her as about the funniest thing ever. (“Mr. George Jones and Merle Haggard in a tie-dye?” she’d said, laughing over my protest that I listened to the Grateful Dead, too.) In her hands, she’s cradling the green bottle of Heineken that had accompanied us on our trek and would remain in her possession until we were ready to leave. She wasn’t much of a drinker, but she’d learned that if she carried an open bottle of beer with her, she could appear social. To our right in the picture, sunlight streams down, lighting the water. To our left, darkness gathers in the trees.