The Fisherman

by John Langan

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.

When I was at the river, though, if I didn’t feel any better, at least I didn’t feel any worse.

I was baptized Catholic, and went to C.C.D. until my confirmation, but neither of my parents was all that religious. It was more something they felt they had to do to me until I was a certain age, when they could stop. They stopped, I stopped, and that was that.

It’s hard to hold onto any tragedies that aren’t your own for very long.

But there are some things, no matter if they’re true, you can’t live with them. You have to refuse them. You turn your eyes away from whatever’s squatting right there in front of you and not only pretend it isn’t there now, but that you never saw it in the first place. You do so because your soul is a frail thing that can’t stand the blast-furnace heat of revelation, and truth be damned. What else can a body do?

That’s the problem with telling stories, though, isn’t it? After the dust has settled, when you sit down to piece together what happened, and maybe more importantly how it happened, so you might have some hope of knowing why it happened, there are moments, like the dream, that forecast subsequent events with such accuracy you wonder how you possibly could have been deaf to their message.

He was grinning, Rainer says, but it was no happy smile. It was the smile of a man who knows that he’s committed a terrible act but is trying with all his might to convince himself that that isn’t the case.

Bad as her voice is, her scream is a thousand times worse. Like a devil burning in hell, is how Regina will describe it. Years later, I understand, each of the children will still be waking from nightmares of it.

he is, as a rule, the family’s resident skeptic, champion of what he refers to as “clear thinking.”

Lottie is shocked to see the look written on his features: fear, fear so intense it has him on the brink of tears, his lip trembling. “What is it, Papa?” Lottie asks, “What’s wrong?” But Rainer only shakes his head and says, “It’s time for bed.” So thrown is Lottie by that expression that she forgets to ask her father for the answer he promised, and hurries off to join her sisters in their bed.

Long after they’d crushed the tadpole-things beyond recognition, the men kept stomping, as if they were trying to stamp out the very memory of what they’d seen.

Lottie, who met him a couple of times in passing, said his face looked like he was trying to solve a difficult math problem that was beyond him.

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.

What happens in those few days looms over the rest of her life like a mountain in whose shadow she’s been fated to dwell.

The men can feel whatever it is is causing the knife to shiver, a wrongness in the air that floods their mouths with the taste of metal, twists their stomachs like spoiled milk. They grimace, spit.

He’s surprised at his relief that the others see this thing, too.

This morning, the road seemed more narrow, its curves harder to navigate my truck around.

The trick is, enduring the guilt that grabs you in its broken teeth the minute that comfort ebbs.

There’s a similar feeling of having started something whose outcome you can’t be one-hundred-percent sure of—sometimes,

“What do you mean?” Dan said, the tone of his voice one of indignation, but the expression that flitted across his face one of surprise, as if I’d given voice to a doubt he’d harbored in secret.

but the ease with which their forms shifted made me doubt the efficacy of any weapon I could muster against them.