The Fisherman

Numb with shock, Jacob reels over Angelo, whom he has just killed. Rainer approaches him, wielding the Fisherman’s massive knife, and dips it in Angelo’s blood. He orders Italo and Andrea to dip their axes in the blood as well. Jacob waits for his doom to be pronounced, but Rainer says, “The blood of the innocent […] has power. It will help us to finish our work” (157). Ignoring Jacob’s ,remorse, he orders the men to sever the remaining ropes with their bloody axes.

The ropes flail and writhe like living things when the men chop them. Cleaving one, Jacob ducks too late and a fishhook catches him in the cheek. Rainer cuts the last one with the Fisherman’s own knife. On the other side of the stream, many more fishing lines tether the Leviathan, but Rainer questions the wisdom of trying to cross the stream. He says that the Fisherman has been at his labors for many years, and that to undo his work would take so long that “[their] children would be old men and women” (160) before the men finished their labor. What they have already done, he says, is “enough.”

Over Angelo’s body, the four men recite some words of eulogy. Rainer says there isn’t time to bury him, as the Fisherman will soon regain his strength, but he adds that they have won a “great victory” by staving off the threat to their families and trapping the Fisherman with his own tools. With luck, he says, the Leviathan will eventually tear itself free and tow the Fisherman off to sea. Even if not, “it will be the work of decades” (162) for the Fisherman to break free. As the men watch in awe and terror, the Leviathan rears up out of the water. The four of them dash away through the clinging trees, but Jacob feels a torpor overcome him and almost loses the will to go on. Rainer pushes at him from behind, urging him on with Lottie’s name, and Jacob realizes that Rainer may yet forgive him his Austrian heritage and his murder of a friend and let him marry Lottie. This thought gives him the strength to find his way out.

In future years, Jacob’s escape from the Dort House, Lottie’s face glowing in his mind like a beacon, will be Lottie’s most cherished part of the story. For Jacob, though, it was a close thing. As he ran, the Leviathan thrashed its way back into open water, raising a mountain of surf, and Jacob just barely managed to squeeze through the front door of the Dort House before it closed.

As the four men emerge into the fresh dawn air, they notice that the walls of water are gone and the ground beneath their feet is damp with ordinary dew. Rainer says this means they have succeeded for the time being. Now, if they all manage to die in their own beds in the usual way, their triumph will be complete. If the Fisherman’s revenge comes later to menace their children or grandchildren, then at least they themselves will be dead and “past caring.”

Almost a year later, when the work crews that have been stripping and emptying the valley for the reservoir reach the Station and the Dort House, it is still widely assumed that “the Guest” lives there, even though no one has seen him in years. When the Sheriff and his men force the door open, they find devastation. Not only is every piece of furniture smashed to bits, but the interior walls have been leveled, leaving only a decaying shell furred with thick black mold. Under a pile of shattered furniture, a deformed arm protrudes, its hand weirdly jointed with webbed, clawed fingers. Without investigating further, the Sheriff orders the house to be soaked with gasoline and burned. Afterward, even the stones and ashes are taken away.

As the work crews dismantle the Dort compound, with its many outhouses and orchards, their work is brought almost to a halt by one massive tree stump whose roots stubbornly cling to the earth. Finally, the workers dislodge it with three teams of mules. In the tree’s tentacle-like roots, they discover a large, translucent stone about the size of a human skull. Pale blue with white veins, it resembles a gem and seems warm to the touch. Looking into its facets, one worker swears to have seen “a distant, fiery eye looking back at him” (172). The next morning, the gem is mysteriously gone. Rumors fly, but Rainer shrugs off Jacob’s questions, saying, “The Eye? […] Someone else will worry about that” (173).

With George and Helen gone, Italo and his wife, Regina, become the guardians of the dead couple’s children, straining their meager resources. Things get considerably worse for them a couple of months later when Regina is diagnosed with cancer of the uterus. On her deathbed, her last words are, “The woman.” For a time, it looks as if Italo will have to give the orphaned children up for adoption, but fortunately, Maria, the oldest of them, steps into the nurturing role. With no thoughts now of marriage, she becomes a “maiden aunt” for the family.

Jacob and Lottie marry three years later, around the time the Esopus Valley is flooded for the reservoir. A few years later, in 1916, the reservoir brims with water and the last of the workers are disbanded. Rainer secures a position for himself in the Water Authority, and for the next 10 years, he plays a vital role in maintaining the Catskill Aqueduct, the water tunnel that runs south from the reservoir.

In Woodstock, Rainer and Clara live a few doors down from Lottie and Jacob, who now have two children. Occasionally Italo, who now has his own stonemason business, visits with Rainer’s family. Years pass, and Italo dies of heart failure. Rainer lives for a while longer but rapidly experiences mental decline due to Alzheimer’s. Clara remembers the eerie pale light that used to glow on his face when he pored over his hermetic books, and she reflects that this “dead light sank inside him, bleaching away whatever of him it fell on” (178). When Rainer dies, Clara feels as if she had already lost her husband to that mysterious book long ago.

In these chapters, Howard’s tale finally meanders its way to Dutchman’s Creek, an elusive stream that shifts its route, confusing fishermen and hikers. The creek’s source is assumed to be the reservoir, and it runs all the way to the Hudson. Some years before his decline and death, Rainer is asked by the Water Authority to trace the as-yet-unnamed “new creek’s” origins, which snake confusedly through dense woods. Hearing rumors of an “enormous fish” in the creek, as well as macabre sightings of dead loved ones, Rainer fears the worst, so he asks Jacob to accompany him on this mission. Bringing no tools or weapons, the two men descend a series of wooded slopes toward the creek’s foaming rapids, which Jacob perceives as teeming with “white bodies.” To his guilt and horror, Jacob then hears the voice of Angelo, the man he killed with an axe. Angelo’s forlorn voice describes to the agony of his violent death and the grim solitude of his new, hellish home. He urges Jacob to join him by drowning himself. Long haunted by his killing of Angelo and terrified that his children might someday be punished for it, Jacob moves to obey his dead friend, but a tearful Rainer prevents him from doing so.

Rainer tells Jacob that when he was a professor at the University of Heidelberg, he had a colleague, a friendly rival named Wilhelm Vanderwort, who was obsessed with discovering the most ancient of human languages, such as that spoken in the Garden of Eden. Rainer, whose own genius lay in his careful research, discovered two old, rare books that contained samples of an identical prehistoric tongue. Ignoring the authors’ warnings, the two men eventually learned to pronounce the language and experienced an instant, magical effect. Speaking words in this language made the words’ meaning (e.g., “dark” or “light”) a literal, physical reality. This, they realized, was a profound discovery.

Upon researching the history of the books, Rainer and Wilhelm made contact with a shadowy group of scholars who used their knowledge to explore otherworldly realms below the city. As part of an initiation, the two men descended to one of these worlds to steal a flower believed to contain the soul of a priest; in that particular realm, their act was one of both heresy and murder. As they returned, the brash, impatient Wilhelm scoffed at Rainer’s reminder to perform the necessary rituals to protect himself, and an angry Rainer decided to let his rival take his chances. As a result, Wilhelm died horribly while delivering a university lecture, his cursed body blackening and disintegrating within seconds. This incident led to the scandal that ruined Rainer’s professorial career and sent him to America.

Now, on the banks of this mysterious creek, Rainer tells Jacob that he can hear Wilhelm’s voice solemnly accusing him of murder, “as surely as if I had poured poison into his coffee” (188). Worse, Wilhelm accuses Rainer of fleeing Germany like a coward instead of continuing their vital work. Suggesting that this place looks “familiar,” Rainer produces a silver knife, the same one he used in his spells years before, and carves a strange mark on a tree. As Jacob turns to leave, Rainer, as if paralyzed, stares steadily into the woods, and mutters the words, “Thalassa, thalassa.” Finally, Rainer rejoins Jacob, and they begin their trek back to civilization.

As they walk back along the stream, Jacob can still hear Angelo’s voice accusing him, but fainter than before. Once their car is within sight, Jacob asks Rainer if “the problem has been solved” (190). Rainer replies, “As much as it can be. […] The marks on the tree will turn aside most who come near it” (190). He adds that this measure is the best that can be done, short of a “human sacrifice.” He says this without a smile, which unnerves Jacob.

In the 1920s, the creek acquires the name “Deutschman’s Creek” (“German’s Creek”), but the name is soon corrupted into “Dutchman’s Creek.” After Jacob’s death from lung cancer in the 1950s, Lottie’s memories of her life in the Ashokan camp feel increasingly like the “invention […] of an adolescent imagination” (192). Sometimes, she will rummage through her bureau for an old keepsake: a small piece of metal stained with her late husband’s blood. This is the fishhook that buried itself in Jacob’s cheek when he chopped the Fisherman’s rope with his axe. Years later, reciting her long tale to Reverend Mapple, she’ll show him the bloody hook as a kind of proof.