The Fisherman

Abe follows the woman into the woods, marveling at the unblemished whiteness of her skin, as smooth and pure as his first glimpse of Marie’s nakedness before the ravages of cancer and chemotherapy. The only difference is her strange, metallic eyes. When he catches up to her, she turns and says his name in Marie’s warm voice. Grasping her hand, Abe breaks down sobbing, and Marie kisses him with increasing passion and arousal. Abe’s sorrow gives way to desire, and with a “searing urgency,” he makes love to her on the forest floor. Afterward, to his horror, he beholds not his wife but an abomination with tendril-like hair, a flat snout, a piranha-like jaw, “daggered teeth,” and webbed, clawed fingers. Its scaly mouth exhales a sigh of “postcoital contentment,” sending Abe scrambling away. The creature follows, its face shimmering until it looks like Marie again. When he asks “what” she is, she says that she is “a reflection.” He then asks what he caught on his line, and she answers, “a nymph,” adding that all of his questions will be answered “upriver,” where Dan is now looking for his wife, Sophie, and his boys. As Abe follows “Marie,” he feels aroused again by her familiar nakedness and scolds himself that he may not be too different from Dan.

As he follows her through the forest, he sees a road made from large, flat stones, then an ancient pedestal supporting a headless statue of a pregnant woman. Carved in the style of ancient Greece or Rome, the statue has bloodlike stains on its neck. Marie describes it as “the Mother,” a goddess of great antiquity. As they pass trees that look like a child’s oil painting, vividly colored and unreal, Marie warns him not to touch their razor-sharp leaves. Soon, a male figure approaches: a youngish man in a baggy coat with a stringy beard. Marie transforms when she sees him, growing tall and dark-haired, and terrible wounds appear on her body. In a foreign tongue, she screams and spits at the man, who weeps and twists his hat in his hands as if in apology before fleeing into the woods. In seconds, Marie looks like herself again. Too terrified to turn away, Abe continues to follow her. Soon, they pass a ruined temple full of buzzing flies and the stench of blood. Nearby is a huge animal like an elephant, but with cloven feet and a red-gold hide. Marie tells Abe that it is one of the supernatural “Oxen,” and that its head was severed to be used as “bait.” She then utters a strange word: “Apep.”

Marie leads Abe to the shore of an ink-black ocean, where multitudes of lily-pale figures like her mill about. Anchored to the beach are dozens of heavy, taut ropes that fan out to sea, held and pulled on by the white figures, up to 10 of them to a rope. Many of the ropes, which bristle with big, sharp hooks, are tethered to a stone hovel full of cracks and fissures. Bound to its outer wall by crisscrossing loops of rope is a human figure—the man with the stringy beard from the woods—but here impaled by innumerable hooks. Sitting cross-legged at the man’s feet is Dan. To his right are a slender woman and two toddler boys, all with flat, golden eyes and skin as white as pearl.

Dan introduces them to Abe as his wife and sons. The Fisherman, he says, has devoted all of his strength to recapturing this Great Power—Apophis—since the terrible blow Rainer dealt to his project decades ago. For the first time, Abe notices the island’s resemblance to an immense, scaled, snakelike creature: the Leviathan, whose head is the big stone hovel. Dan tells him how he came upstream and found his family here on the Leviathan’s back, whereupon he made love to Sophie. The Fisherman suffered a loss like theirs too, he says: Hungarian soldiers slaughtered his wife and children in front of him. But the Fisherman survived and learned how to break through the “mask” and work nature to his will. To complete his task, Dan says, the Fisherman just needs “strength,” and Dan knows how to give it to him. However, Abe suspects that the Fisherman siphons his strength from grief-stricken people like himself and Dan.

Abe begs Dan to leave this place and come “home,” but Dan insists that home is where his family is, and that he has no intention of ever leaving them again. Refusing to listen to Abe’s suspicions about his “family,” he pleads with Abe to “join” him. Abe makes eye contact with the bound Fisherman and finds that he can read the figure’s memories. He sees an enraged man in a dirty tunic slaughtering a tall, dark-haired woman and her children. He then sees the man’s long, obsessive quest for knowledge and power so that he may redeem himself and recover his family. Abe senses many other dimensions to the Fisherman: some of them vast and monstrous, and others petty, “bitter,” and malicious.

Appalled, Abe tries to walk away, but Dan tries to kill him with a big “bluish” rock, saying, “I don’t want to do this. […] It’s—if he has your strength, then he won’t have to take them away from me” (238). Fending him off, Abe draws his knife. Dan’s family begins to transform, sprouting sharklike teeth, which Dan sees but ignores. As Dan attacks Abe again, Abe manages to slash his arm with the knife. Then, Dan’s “family members,” smelling blood, fall on Dan and greedily devour him. Abe bolts for the “Vivid Trees,” turning back just once to see the great eye of the Leviathan staring directly at him. Leaping from the Leviathan’s back into the stream, Abe is swept onto a pile of rocks, cracking some of his bones. Dragged deep underwater by one of the white creatures, he sees to his horror that it is “Marie.” Almost resigned to death at his “wife’s” webbed hands, he suddenly kicks free and manages to pull himself onto dry land before everything goes black.

A couple of teenagers find Abe, bloody and hallucinating, on the bank of Dutchman’s Creek, and for weeks he battles a raging fever at Wiltwyck Hospital. Semi-delirious, he tells the police the truth about what happened to Dan and himself, including their fight, making himself a suspect in Dan’s mysterious disappearance. After a mass search of the area, Dan’s tacklebox turns up, but no other signs of him are found, and Abe’s fishing gear and the “nymph” he caught are never discovered. Finally Abe satisfies the detectives with a more believable story about slipping on the rocks and falling into the creek while trying to keep up with his reckless friend.

At IBM, Abe is pressured into early retirement. He now finds himself without a job, a friend, or his beloved hobby. After a few abortive attempts at fishing, he decides that the sport is no longer possible for him. For years, he is plagued by increasingly surreal nightmares of that last fishing trip. Though he misses and mourns Dan and sympathizes to a degree with the grief and desperation that drove Dan to make his pact with the Fisherman, Abe still feels bitterness toward him, since Dan “must have known he was buying into […] a lie, and he had been willing to sacrifice the reality of friendship […] in favor of that lie” (251). Seeking closure, Abe begins studying the Bible and comparative mythology but still cannot make sense of his experience.

The years pass, and Abe returns to fishing when he befriends a couple and their 10-year-old daughter, Sadie, who is a budding “outdoorswoman.” She and her father invite Abe on their fishing trips, and this arrangement dilutes the horror of his memories. However, in 2001, the 9/11 terrorist attacks remind Abe of the devastation that fanatics are capable of once their minds and souls are defiled by some “greater purpose.” A few years later, a Category 4 hurricane hits the Svartkil Valley, marooning Abe in his house, which loses electricity. While making dinner by candlelight, Abe sees a shambling creature resembling Dan, but with fangs and golden eyes. The creature says that the recent hurricane has “widened the crack that leads to this place” (261), and that he has come a “long way” to visit Abe, the one he blames for his death. Abe counters that Dan brought it all on himself. As the thing enters, menacing Abe with his claws, Abe douses him with cooking spray, which ignites from the candles, searing “Dan” like a flamethrower. Shrieking, the creature stumbles backward and plunges into the muddy floodwaters, which swallow him whole. Staring into the water, Abe sees floating “objects” that fill him with terror. The next morning, as a rescue boat carries him to safety, he looks back at the many rows of pale “people” floating in the water around his house—including a blank-faced and golden-eyed Marie. Bobbing beside her are a girl and a boy, close to adolescence, their gaping mouths daggered with serrated teeth. Abe “fancies” that they have his mother’s nose.