The Fisherman

As Rainer rushes home, he wonders if his recent “experiments” with his secret books may have been responsible for Helen’s attack on his daughter Lottie. As he sits on Lottie’s bed, she does not awaken, and her forehead is scorching hot. He tells Clara that Helen has “done violence to a part of Lottie we cannot see or touch” (110). He murmurs a “blessing” to her, which he says will do her some good, but he cautions that the “connections” between Lottie, Helen, and the evil man at the root of it are all vastly complex. Clara tells him coldly that he must do whatever it takes to protect their family, adding that he has wasted too much time already. Rainer fumes at this slight on his knowledge and abilities, which are all-important to him, reflecting, “For her to attack him here, the last bastion of his pride and self-respect, is the kind of betrayal of which only someone you love is capable” (111).

After his anger calms, Rainer takes his books from their hiding place. Back in Germany, Lottie once spied on her father as he read from one of these: a tall, gray volume secured with a lock. As he opened it, the air in the room darkened, and the book “appeared to be giving off a black light, dimming her father’s face” (112-13). For years afterward, she had nightmares of her father with a “black emptiness” where his face should be.

Now, in her trance, Lottie’s dreams are much worse, trapping her in a claustrophobic darkness with the maggoty face of her “other self” and its litany of hideous fantasies, many of which involve her parents. She is most horrified by the “recognition” that the creature’s words are all true, and that she really has harbored all of these desires. She now feels them with such an intensity that it seems to her as if she has actually acted on them. By this point in her fugue state, her other, normal thoughts and feelings have begun to shut down, and if things do not change, there may soon be nothing left of her but the “horror.”

The next day, Clara is frightened to notice that Rainer has a strange light in his eyes, an intense but “dead” radiance, like the “cold glare” of lightning. Without a word, he takes a silver dinner knife from the kitchen, goes outside, and carves strange symbols (“swirling arabesques”) on the door of Helen’s house. When Clara looks at the symbols, they writhe like living things. Rainer goes to the rear of the house and repeats the ritual, then throws the knife point-first into the ground in front of the house. His face glowing with an “unearthly light,” he tells Clara that he has made a “box” around Helen, trapping her. This, he says, will help Lottie by throwing a “cloth” over the “mirror” that torments her. He says that he will eventually destroy Helen, but the true source of evil lies elsewhere; Helen was merely a “water thing,” but “the man in the big house” (118) may be a Schwartzkunstler (black magician), in which case he will be difficult to defeat. Clara scoffs at the idea that a sorcerer would be interested in wielding power over an obscure community like theirs. She argues that the man must be just a “dabbler,” like Rainer himself, but her husband cautions her that supernatural beings are often drawn to remote locales for mysterious reasons of their own. Meanwhile, Lottie’s sleep grows more restful. Her father’s incantations have drawn a fog-like curtain over her, protecting her from the worst of the black ocean’s terrors.

Rainer gathers a group of neighbors to aid him in his mission. Among them are his Italian friend, Italo, and a pair of brothers, Angelo and Andrea. Also accompanying them is a shy young Austrian named Jacob Schmidt, who harbors a romantic interest in Lottie, for which Clara often teases her. After that day’s events, Rainer resolves to overlook his bias against Austrians and accept Jacob into the family.

(Jacob and Lottie will share a long life together, and it is from Jacob that Lottie will learn, decades later, the full truth of the Fisherman, particularly the horrific events of this day. By that time, her father, after a long mental decline due to Alzheimer’s, will be five years dead.)

Rainer leads his group, armed with axes, up the street to Helen and George’s house. With a pocket knife, he carves three marks into the wooden handle of his axe, then does the same to the other men’s axes. Then he draws the still-vibrating silver dinner knife from the ground in front of the house. Before entering, he warns the men to close their ears to whatever Helen says, as her knowledge of their secrets is her last remaining weapon.

Inside, a thick, black mold covers the floor, walls, and ceiling. Helen stands in the middle of the room in a puddle of dark water that seeps from her skin. Rainer asks Helen who her master is, but she refuses to say, instead telling him to ask “Wilhelm Vanderwort.” Rainer repeats his question, and finally she says, “The Fisherman.” As Rainer continues to question her, Helen says the Fisherman casts his line for “Apep” and that his work is almost done. His ropes, she says, are woven from “the hairs of ten thousand dead men,” and the hooks forged from “the swords of a hundred dead kings” (126). As for whether the Fisherman has “set the lines,” she says, “the near ones” (126), and Rainer looks relieved. He makes a small gesture with his hand, and Helen dissolves into a “fall” of foul water. The men emerge from the house, gasping for air. Rainer says that Helen is “gone” and that it would a “good thing” if her house were burned. The next morning, it bursts into flames, releasing hideous plumes of smoke. A boy who stands too close to the fire dies horribly as toadstool-like lesions burst from his skin. He is the “last fatality” connected with Helen and George.

As Helen’s house burns, Rainer and his group, having completed their mission to Dort House, stagger back to their homes. After sleeping soundly for a day or two, they rise and tell their families that the danger is now past. However, Andrea soon leaves for parts unknown, while rumor has it that his brother Angelo ran off into the night with a handful of axes, never to be seen again. However, if the villagers were ever told the truth about what happened to Angelo, they likely wouldn’t believe it.

The narrative backtracks to reveal that immediately after dealing with Helen, Rainer and the others follow the moonlit road to the Station and thence to the big Dort House. On the way, Rainer tells them what he knows of the Fisherman, explaining that in the late 1500s, a young Hungarian left his home in Budapest and traveled much of Europe, seeking arcane knowledge. This young man had married a beautiful Turkish woman, but during his country’s uprising against the Ottomans, his wife and children were slaughtered, reputedly by Hungarian soldiers. In Hamburg, the young Hungarian sought out a scholar of the occult named Heinrich Khunrath, who owned a volume of hermetic lore known as The Secret Words of Osiris. The Hungarian was very interested in this book, thinking it might help him to catch one of the universe’s “Great Powers”—namely, the serpent-like behemoth known in the Bible as the Leviathan. Rainer explains to his companions that this primordial monster is “closer to a god than it is to a devil” (134). Somehow, the Hungarian “won” this magical book from Khunrath. With its help, he now fishes for the Leviathan, hoping to harness some of its vast power and restore his slain family to life. Rainer states that the ocean where the Leviathan lives lies under the skin of the earth, and in some places, “the earth is thinner, the distance to the ocean not so great” (134). Rainer explains that The Fisherman is centuries old and wields the power of Osiris’s book, but this alone cannot make him a full Schwarzkunstler; he can still be defeated.

As Rainer and his group approach the woods surrounding the Dort House over barren ground stripped and denuded to serve as the floor of the great reservoir, Jacob glimpses a deathly white figure that floats in midair. Aside from its gold eyes and scaled skin, it resembles a human. Impossibly, the space between the trees ripples like dark water, as if the men are staring downward into a lake instead of into a forest. Rainer tells them that here, the “dark ocean” is seeping through. The five of them proceed between the blocks of water, and with a flash of “black light,” Rainer breaks down the door of Dort House with his axe. Making a strange gesture with his outstretched hand, he leads them inside as the “weird radiance” on his face grows stronger.

The interior of the Dort House is thick with evergreen trees, and the floor seems to be of dirt. Soon they reach a clearing, where a stream of white water gushes through a ravine. As they follow the slope of the ground into the trees, the stream gathers in force, and Jacob fights against panic. His legs weaken like taffy, and he feels “as if there’s a weight hung from his neck, pulling him on” (144). Finally, he falls to his knees, and a strange but oddly familiar noise makes him raise his head. What he sees “chases all thought […] from his mind” (144).

In the distance, an impossible ocean crashes on a rocky shore. The ocean is dark, as if “made of night” (145). In the midst of the violent waves, something looms: a creature so vast that at first Jacob mistakes it for an island. Darkening the beach are rivulets of blood, dripping from three gigantic golden-skinned animals resembling bulls. The beasts have been decapitated, and their heads are impaled on giant hooks the size of a ship’s anchors. Everywhere on the beach are great coils and stacks of ropes. Close by are massive tree stumps that have been bored with holes and strung with ropes that stretch out to sea. The ropes strum like guitar strings, and Jacob can see many other ropes on the far side of the stream, most of them taut, as if hooked into some titanic beast. Then someone calls to Jacob in German, asking him what he wants. The man has a stringy beard and a boyish face and wears a “rugged apron” drenched in gore. Jacob knows he must be the Fisherman.

At a command from Rainer, Angelo plies his axe against one of the taut ropes. Jacob joins him and feels a tremendous jolt, as if from a lightning bolt, as the rope snaps apart. As he and his companions attack other ropes, making slow but steady progress, the Fisherman dips his bloody knife into the stream, then snaps his arm. A “ball” of water whips into the air and lances toward Angelo, striking him in the throat. As Andrea screams his brother’s name, the water “invades” Angelo’s form, vanishing into him. His body goes rigid, and the eyes bulge from his face.