The Fisherman (A horror story unlike any other)

[Note from the author: So here I am, on my upward climb to 52 new short stories in 52 weeks. This is number fourteen. An interesting number. The fortnight; writing 'The Fisherman' took nearly that. It was like pulling a treble hook out of my neocortex (no pun intended). But I'm glad I suffered through the pain. There is a place beyond thought where forgotten kingdoms crumble, where things wait eagerly for a hole to open in the sky, so they might leap into reality. We writers are the hole-makers. We are the shaman in a world that's dependence on technology has all but atrophied the imagination. Let me make your mind a movie screen. Sit here with me, in the darkness. The room is empty. No one will shame you if you scream.]

Stars stabbed desert darkness. Ethan glanced up, wondering if the world was poisoned and God had abandoned it; if the Civil War raging east was not the curse of Cain revisited, brother against brother, and the stars themselves not the jagged thorn-holes of The Redeemer cast into the blackness. He forced the priest’s warning from his mind, blocked memories of the countless entreaties for his father’s safe return, on his knees in the church, staring at the alter, begging for the wine to transubstantiate and the stale wafer to become—

Flesh.

Ethan stopped running. 

The word paralyzed him, called images of the kitchen: pieces dripping from the rafters; heavy footsteps in the room behind him; Mother fleeing into the night. He shook his head to clear it, scanning the granite cuts for movement.

It shrieked then, cutting off into the draw below. The claw-scrabble of movement echoed up the canyon. He tried to catch its direction. But the mist obscured it.

It’s sniffing for you, and soon enough to catch. Get on now. It ain’t too late.

He charged through catclaw and manzanita, thrusting up low hills until the ground leveled and he could run. Trying to be quiet, but the scree making it impossible, rolling down the sandstone cliffs with an hourglass rattle. It was a strange way to describe a sound. It filled his mind with pictures.

The Injun witch Stormcrow kept an hourglass blown of red-rippled silicon. Ethan recalled the first time he’d seen it, how it had seemed a great bloodshot eye.

The eye watches, Stormcrow had whispered, clicking his sharp teeth, and turning the glass until its vein-webbed bulb faced Ethan. But what does it see? A coward risen from his rags to clutch the club turned on his family? A reckoner of abuses? Or just a fool? Then, leaning across his ox-bone table with a thoughtful pause: I say the third. Always the third. There is power in threes.

Thinking about it made Ethan's eyes burn. He’d been betrayed. Stormcrow had seen a boy blinded by rage, by folly, and hadn't given one red damn to dissuade him. Worse: Ethan had allowed himself to be tricked.       

He felt the hatchet tucked into his belt. I’ll kill him. I’ll cut his old red throat, and watch it bleed spiders. I’ll—

Another shriek rent the mist, changing pitch, as of a face turned suddenly away. Moving into the lower draws, away from him.

Ethan backed into the bushes, climbed an arrowhead of rock, being careful of the footholds. So careful. At its point, he balanced himself, arms out, staring down the mountain’s twisting spine.

He could hear it down there, laughing and growling, the crack-thump-drag of its awkward legs. The longer he stood, the more it seemed the growl concealed a dark intelligence. In two minutes he was positive.

The thing was speaking. A single word.

“Son.”

The realization made him faint. The earth fractured, moving beneath him. His knees went to water and spilled him on his ass. He razed his knuckles scrambling to keep balanced on the rock. Then he saw it, in the distance, crossing two bushes in a leap. 

A flash of deformed flesh. The blood a thick black paint beneath the moonlight.

He stood to run, blind with panic, and felt his body tilt with nothing there to support it.  His heel dropped into open space, and then he was pinwheeling his arms and trying hard not to scream. The rock slammed up into his body. His wrist folded back and gave with a dry snap. He opened his mouth, felt the sharp rap of his skull bouncing off granite, and heard his scream compact itself in a breathless grunt.

Ethan tumbled down the rock in a cloud of dust. He rolled onto his back, reached out for the purple sky, watched it sink into the ocean of black ink welling from the corners of his eyes. The world grew thin. Somewhere he could hear a pounding tide, its waves breaking in an endless chain.

“I am a fool,” he whispered.

But by then he was already unconscious.  

          

*****

Ethan was afraid, and yet fear did not stop him from climbing the blasted canyon that lead to Stormcrow’s hogan.

The priest’s guidance had done little. He’d come to realize in that short time with the cleric that the word of God was final, entreaties were useless, and life was doomed to fall with all the crushing force of an avalanche.

The priest was a fool. Helping to assuage the suffering caused by a dying relative or missing pet were the “challenges of faith” Father Morrison was most used to rectifying. But life hid blacker things. Things to be survived.

“My father is dead,” Ethan told him.

Morrison offered a solemn nod, patting Ethan’s shoulder. “A loss most difficult to reckon. But there are things one can do to honor the dead, boy. Tend your mother and her brood. Be the man your father was. Be—”             

“You mistake my meaning. My father breathes, though it reeks of the still.”

Morrison’s eyes clouded. “I have no time for a child’s morbid games.”

Ethan went on without pausing. “He came home gutshot. Was up in the way of Bloody Kansas, fightin’ Lincoln’s war. You heard’a that, Father? Bloody Kansas?”

Morrison shook his head.

“It’s what they call it. What they’ll call it yet from now. Murderin’. Pillagin’. Ain’t nothing Christian ‘bout what my Father done. Burning farmsteads. Killin’ wives and babies with the men out fighting, so’s that when they return, it’s to ashes and nothin’ more.”

Morrison looked away. “And how does a father come to vent such sins before his son?”

“He don’t. The drink’s got him with a fierceness. He lulls on the porch. Sweatin’. Screamin’ at the fields. He wanders the canyons and talks to the rocks. Calls his old infantry by name. They have discussions, or at least he does. The sins vent themselves. Mother makes me watch him. Awful gulches down that way, can swallow a man if he ain’t careful.”

Morrison nodded. “I see. You say you’re father died.”

“Yes sir. The good parts of him. He was never wholesome. But what little good he held done dried up in Bloody Kansas.”

“Why have you come here, Ethan?”

“Permission.”

Morrison waited, inclining his brows. “I don’t understand.”

“I want to kill him. And I think God should know. But since he don’t listen none, I figure his lackey will do.”

“Lord in Heaven!” Morrison rose, walking away, laughing in shock. “Boy, you’re fit to bring Hellfire down on your back. If ye’ve come for assistance in your damnation, I cannot offer it. Forgiveness is the word of God.”

Ethan nodded, slowly. “And is retribution not also a word of God?”

Morrison considered. “Aye, it is another word. But the reckoning is God’s.”

“God is deaf. I’ve done bloodied my knees asking. The skies are empty, Priest.”

“Don’t you go sinning in His house, Ethan Callahan. Beg forgiveness.”

Ethan stood as if to strike him. “I’ll do no such thing. And I’ll not sit idle while my mother’s face disappears in a swollen mess. My brother Jimmy took ill last month. Died in the night.”

“Aye,” Morrison looked at the ground, “I heard and was sorry. Hay fever is a merciless business. But Jimmy is with God, Ethan. It was his time.”

“What you don’t know,” Ethan stepped forward, making Morrison look him in the eye, “is that we buried him with a bruise around his neck.”

Morrison said nothing.

“The shape of a hand. Three fingers and a thumb. Stretched from under one ear…” Ethan held his own throat to illustrate, “to the other.”

“Three fingers, y’say?”

“Aye. And you’ll recall my father’s pinky. Lost it when he was twelve.”

Morrison swallowed. “This is a matter for the Sheriff.”

“I’d need proof for that. Jimmy’s done rot for half the month, and summer’s made easy work of it.”

Morrison turned. “I’ll not warrant a killing; doubly not in the name of God. Be gone with ye, Ethan. Beg forgiveness. God is good, though his ways are mysterious. Beg to be delivered. Vengeance is a death all its own.”

And so Ethan had stalked into the wind of the blasted canyon, marching for three hours, until his ankles were blistered and his face was dry and a single ribbon of black smoke cut the horizon.

“Stormcrow,” he whispered, running now. “You crazy old son of a bitch.”

*****

The red-rippled hourglass drained its black sand.

Ethan sat in silence, the beak-nosed skeleton hunched before him, clutching at a bone-wicker necklace and staring without blinking beneath a nest of gray black hair. Two summers gone Ethan had seen a Mexican trampled in a stampede. The man had been drunk, and they’d carried him to the undertaker in a blanket, his brains pooling from his ears, and the whites of his eyes gone crimson.

“How come your eyes look like that?” Ethan finally asked.   

Stormcrow smiled. His teeth were sharp and thin, as if he’d spent a lifetime chewing bones. “What one sees cannot be unseen, boy. Darkness leaves its brand.”

“So you are a witch.”

“Some say.” His red eyes flicked to the hourglass. “Would you waste your last minute concerning my beauty? Perhaps ye’d like to know the length of my root?” And he laughed, an evil sound that burnt his ears.

"No."

"Course not," said Stormcrow. "The boy wishes to take the blade to his maker." 

“My father,” Ethan corrected.

“Is a father not a maker?”

When Ethan stayed silent, Stormcrow moved on. “And what price would a fool pay to kill the seed that sprung him?”

“I’ve got money. Cattle. I can get what you want.”

“Vengeance has but one price, and that is blood.” And then, from nowhere, the witch was holding a white sphere of woven wicker in his hand. 

It looked like a Christmas ornament to Ethan. The pale roots, braided tight as rope, seemed to glow in the hogan’s darkness. 

“Is the purchase fair?”

Ethan couldn’t take his eyes from it. “What do you mean by blood?”

Stormcrow grinned. “What do I mean, indeed…”

*****

It took him two days to find the courage, two days of hearing his father curse at the cacti and kick the dog and slap his mother for sassing, though Ethan never heard her speak. 

Ethan sat on the other side of his door, a hand on his hatchet, stealing himself to protect them. But every time he rose with the scream on his lips he saw Father Morrison’s piteous expression before he’d stalked into the darkness:

And vengeance is a death all its own.

And so he’d probed the pale ornament of wickerwork instead, snuffing the candles and watching it glow between his palms. It was strange how, the longer he stared, the hours seemed to melt away and the cold night became more tolerable. He felt the pulse of another place, and when he pressed his ear to the braided surface he fancied he could hear it.

Soon the world disappeared. He was standing on a noxious shoreline. Black tides lathered a crimson beach where gray creatures crawled on spiny legs, pulling things faintly human from the brine. The wind carried a low music, flutes and ancient woodwinds deep enough to have been carved from solid trees.

And then the heat. On his back. Pulling his eyes behind him. Ethan turned against his will. Loosed a breathless yelp. Felt the wet sand crash into his knees.

Over dunes of misshapen bones reared a figure in billowing gray robes, inhuman in height, thin beyond description, its face a pit of darkness. It raised the gibbet of its arm. Beckoned with a bleeding finger…

Come.

           

*****

Ethan could hear his father screaming. He looked down at the ornament in his hands with growing disbelief. Yellow red light streamed through his window. Sunset light.

It was a dream, he told himself. And now you’ve done slept the day away.

He was still on his belly, and when he tried to move, there was a soreness in his muscles beyond explanation. He rolled onto his back, pushed himself to a sitting position, and vomited on the floor. He was hungry and afraid, kept seeing the swirling black face of the thing in wisping robes, its long white finger dripping as it curled to urge him forward.

And even then he understood that something greater than his simple wish for revenge was at work, something with machinations of its own. Despite it—maybe because of it—he felt a sudden courage. A protection.

“Ye stain my clothes,” his father was screaming, “and burn my food! Raise my children to be cowards and whores!” A sharp slap echoed through the house. “I ought to burn that cursed smile from your face. Make ye look like the Henderson boy after that grapeshot grazed his jaw. And even he was grateful to be alive. But you … you! Y’walk around here like a ghost, like I’ve done cursed the whole lot of ye and dragged ye inta Hell. Well, why don’t I, then? Come on, girl! Let’s keep the Devil busy!”

Ethan staggered from his room, pulling the hatchet from his belt and holding the wicker sphere in his left hand. He burst into the kitchen in time to see his mother on her knees, struggling to keep her face away from the wood stove. His father had her by her hair, the old muscle beneath his stained shirt rippling as he tired to force her down.

Ethan stomped the floor. “Let go of her, coward!”

His father snapped his face back like a wolf, his teeth a yellow snarl. “This don’t concern ye none, boy. Now get on t’your room.”

Ethan crossed the kitchen in five strides—he was a tall boy—and brought the flat end of the hatchet across his father’s face. The old man screamed, tumbling into the table and knocking it on its side. Ethan hooked his mother under the arm and pulled her to the doorway. “Go! The neighbors. Now.”

“Ethan, honey, y’can’t, ye…” She looked at the old drunk trying to roll to his knees, “He’s your father.”

“My father died in Kansas.”

While his mother took the girls and ran, Ethan stood still as a grave slab, closing his eyes and breathing as Stormcrow had instructed. He could hear his father cursing and threatening, but by the fifth deep breath a womb of pressure began to separate him from the world. Ethan vanished into himself. And soon he returned to the surge of that black and tameless sea, to the screams of objects being dragged out of the water and herded to the bone dunes of a faceless abomination.

Eyes still closed, Ethan lifted the wickerwork sphere.

His father was wrenched into the air. 

Ethan’s voice came in a rasp: “I offer this to The Fisherman. He who tends his throne of bones and combs the seas of men.”

His father screamed.

Ethan snapped his eyes open and gasped. His father’s head was kinked against the ceiling. The room was filled with light, the sunset but a shadow beyond the windows. The old drunk groaned in sudden pain, tearing his shirt off with his bare hands. Sharp implements poked and moved beneath his skin. It looked as if a dozen sticks were tracing messages along his torso. A symbol. Over and over again.

“Your killing me, BOY! I’m your father. I’m your—”

And then Ethan’s hands were moving on their own, piloted by the rhythm of the beach. He told his brain to hurl the sphere--to shatter it--but his arms stayed frozen above him. It was too late.

His father explored his chest with trembling hands. “Make it stop, Ethan! Oh God, make it—” Then he jerked his face up straight, lips trembling. Eyes fixed on the room beyond the kitchen. “What is that? Oh God! Be gone, Demon! I atone! I—!”

Ethan felt his thumbs push through the wicker. At the same time, the stick-like protrusions punched through his father’s skin. Not sticks, but legs. 

The very same he’d glimpsed on an ancient beach, pulling writhing shapes up from the sea.

Ethan's fingers moved on without him, even as he cried. Thumbs plunging deeper, he felt the cold sand and bonedust texture spill into the room. The wicker ball began to separate, peeling back on an invisible hinge. 

Ethan staggered through the kitchen. “Pa! Pa, I cain’t stop it!” 

A cold breath rushed into the room, tearing the white curtains from their fastenings and snuffing all the lanterns at once. Ethan looked into his father’s eyes. Eyes the black of anthracite.

His Father smiled, at peace, gazing over Ethan’s shoulder. “He who hooks the wayward soul sleeps atop his slaves, and wakes only to drag his bounty from the pounding waves…”

The scent of tides and offal was instant and powerful. Ethan choked, tried to let go, and felt the skin of his palms start to tear. The sphere was holding him. He heard something move in the room behind him, laboring and slow, a thing designed for movement in some other plain…

A thing so tall it has to crouch, he thought, feeling gooseflesh ripple down his back.

The legs uncurled from his father’s body, thickening at their base. They clicked along the ceiling like roots in a sudden fit of growth. Then his father, like the sphere, like Ethan’s trembling heart, was repurposed into some second, hideous shape.

*****

The pain ripped him from unconsciousness. It was like plunging his arm into a fire. Ethan opened his mouth in a silent gasp, staring at the sickle moon, faintly red above the mist. He could hear the thing loping in the bushes ahead. It took everything to keep from screaming. He almost broke his silence when he saw his wrist—the hand twisted and clawlike, the knuckles hanging limp against his forearm—but managed to clamp his lips.

He could feel his heartbeat in the wound, slipping down his arm and wrapping his head with all the fierceness of a vise. When he closed his eyes he saw the crimson beach stretching off into infinity. He snapped his lids wide, trying not to gasp, to keep his lungs tight as the thing loped past the bushes and down into the lower hills.

When he could no longer hear its maddening laughter, he pushed himself onto his knees and pulled off his boots. He would have to be silent, never mind his feet. With one last prayer to the deaf God in which no longer believed, he set out east, pausing every so often to hear a distant sniff cut the air.

*****

           

The moon was almost set by the time he reached Stormcrow’s Hogan. Ethan spied its eternal ribbon of smoke against the purple night. The beast had followed him. He could hear it in the lower trees, bashing itself into branches, moaning in frustration.

Ethan limped into the open clearing, using the side of his bloodied feet. If he survived, he would do little walking until winter. If. It was amazing to him how the human spirit, a thing driven by survival, could so easily befriend the prospect of annihilation.

Twenty feet from the hut he fell to his knees, whimpering as his maimed hand clapped against his forearm. It wasn’t just pain. He felt sick, like his organs were softening, turning on themselves. He bent out on his good arm and vomited. When the water cleared from his eyes, he saw a pile of his own blood steaming in the cold.

He didn’t know what was happening, but couldn’t shake the idea that he’d been infected. A plague. A pestilence.

Vengeance is a death all its own.

Ethan wiped his mouth, tasting seawater. Knees trembling, he pushed himself onto his torn heels, walking bow-legged. He kept his head down, focusing on the ground, watching it stir in and out of focus on black and formless waves. He reached for the hatchet in his belt, only to find that he had dropped it.

You didn’t drop it, boy. He did.

Ethan paused, wondering where that inner-voice had originated. Cold and husky, like his Father’s in those last moments, when his eyes had gone pitch black. He forced his feet another four steps, and fell again. This time the vomit came, and didn’t stop. This time he felt the movement of his organs rearrange into jointed splints of bone, felt them trace against his skin, as a hatchling prods the shell of its inner egg.

He could suddenly hear the distant crash of waves, smell the tang of pale seaweed rotting on the ancient shore. He heard the crunch of bones, the heavy footsteps of a thing marching down from its dune.

Ethan looked up, watched a black film slip across his sight, and saw Stormcrow smiling, his red eyes winking in the moonlight.  “The price is blood.”

He heard the old witch’s words: What one sees cannot be unseen, boy. Darkness leaves its brand.

Red. Like the beach.

Like the blood pouring in a pump stream from Ethan’s mouth.

“You knew…” Ethan reached out with his broken hand, and was amazed to see the wicker ball clutched in its mangled fingers.

Stormcrow plucked it free, smelling it as one might smell a rose. “The tide is high. He waits for you.”

“Who waits?”

“The Fisherman.”

The ensuing silence was broken by the drag of footsteps. Ethan was too sick to be afraid. He tried to move his neck, found his head impossibly heavy, and so flitted his eyes up along his forehead. And there stood a thing unlike any man, and yet wearing a man’s face.

His father’s smile danced above its new body, the lips chewing at themselves, spilling drool into the dirt.

“Son,” it whispered. “Son.”

And as it touched him, Ethan felt the earth turn to tar, closing over him, warm as blood. His breath drained away, and he sank, settling among the razor coral and gently rolling up the shore. Time chewed itself into powder. He watched it blow away into the stars, though there were no stars here in the blackness. For that moment he was eternity, looking down on the whole of all.

And seeing nothing. 

Then the spike lanced through his chest, and he was in the humid light, being dragged through sands the red of Stormcrow’s eyes. He screamed, turned his face up, saw an impossible mountain of bones towering above the beach; and above it, its arms raised in welcome…

The Fisherman called.   

               

             

                
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