Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft (17 page)

Scritch, scratch, no more rats,

The children all shall wail,

Scritch, scratch, the wood’s come back,

The falling of the veil...

The days passed, then the weeks and months. Such stories as there were grew in the telling, and visitors stayed away in their droves. The council were unable to continue pretending that it was most definitely nothing to do with them. They sat for long hours in their chambers, debating and scheming. Finally, they declared there was to be a new plan for Muscoby. It would solve the region’s crippling summer water shortages, and put an end to the much-maligned hosepipe bans. The valley was perfect for a reservoir. No one was going to argue with the compulsory purchase of all those unloved, unwanted, overgrown little cottages. No one who actually counted, anyway.

There had never not been a rat catcher in Muscoby.

Now Muscoby is no more, drowned beneath a dark, forbidding mere. It’s not even much of a place to go fishing. They just can’t seem to keep the stocks high enough, despite their best efforts. Few boats ply the trembling surface of the lake, which shifts and stirs even when there is no wind to drive it. And if there’s the occasional accident, well, everyone knows the dangers of deep water. It will drag you down into its cold embrace, wrap you in its weeds, and string you up between the branches of its sunken forest, to watch the world above with baleful, rotting eyes.

I
CKE
by Greg Stolze

Icke held his killing tool casually, tipping it up against a shoulder with his right hand. The box that accompanied it rested beside his foot. He looked out over the ocean and frowned. It was Friday, the eleventh.

At seventeen, he had a lot on his mind. From where he stood, all he could see was the open water, cold gray foam fading to clear as it touched the bleak gray gravel of the beach. But if he turned around, he’d see Wellesport.

The day smelled like dead mackerel.

Francis Icke (or “Icky” as he was almost always called at school) had been born in Wellesport. He had gone to Wellesport North Elementary, Wellesport East Jr. High, and was now in Wellesport Central High School. He was poor, and pale, and his eyes were a little too close together under his shelving brow. If that wasn’t grief enough, Icke had been dadless since age ten, and was scrawny, with a high, reedy, dissonant voice. He didn’t say much to anyone, and no one said much to him, except in the language of sneers and cut-away glances and bumps that were almost, but not quite, contemptuous shoves.

He sighed, looked down at his tackle box, and opened it. It unfolded smoothly into two ranked rows of small compartments, each one holding lures or hooks. It was like an amphitheater of tempting death, ocean-fishing tackle on one side, and lake and stream on the other. The sinkers and spare line and the fiberglass components of his lightweight stream rod were tidily stowed away. His gear was all top flight, either won in fishing competitions or bought with prize money.

Icke wasn’t good at much, and he didn’t understand much, but he was the best damn fisherman Wellesport had seen in generations. As he started towards the bait shack, he thought about Wendy.

♦

Wendy was the only person who was nice to him. At some level, Icke realized that even she wasn’t
that
nice to him. She didn’t sit next to him at lunch or anything. But nine days earlier, on Wednesday, he’d been assigned to be her partner in Chem Lab. Everyone else laughed, but she didn’t laugh. Didn’t even roll her eyes. There was something unseen going on with that, between Wendy and Mrs. Frye, the always-frowning Chemistry teacher. Was there an understanding between them? Did Frye think Wendy would help him and then he wouldn’t fail? Was Frye punishing Wendy for something? Or did she just think Wendy would be the least disruptive to pair with him? He didn’t get it.

But when he read the lab instructions and started to do it, she corrected his mistake without calling him stupid, and when she passed him a beaker her fingers touched the back of his hand. (As he checked over his excellent fish-killing tool, he looked down. He could remember the exact spot, on the little web by his thumb. Two fingertips, right there.) He said, “Thank you” when she handed him the beaker and she said, “You’re welcome”, just as polite as could be. When class ended he said, “Bye” and she said, “See you later.”

She didn’t ignore him or say, “Yeah” or “Whatever” or “Bye,” but “See you later.” He didn’t want to read too much into that, but he watched her walk away down the hall. It wasn’t until he heard the laughter that he realized he was staring, and blushing.

♦

With his rod assembled and bait in a bucket, Icke walked out to the edge of the dock. He didn’t cast yet. Instead, he sat and closed his eyes. He slumped and let things go away. The chill wind that was mostly passing right through his nylon jacket... He let it go. The growth pains in his shoulder and elbow and hip joints which meant that he was probably going to get even taller and thinner now, and be even hungrier... He let it go. The sorrow at being him, and the anger that everyone else was everyone else... He let it all slide out of him, until he wasn’t a boy in a body any more. He was something else somewhere else.

He’d been able to do it as long as he could remember. Mostly at night, when Mom and Dad were yelling. He’d slide away into bodiless silence, until he could relax into sleep. It wasn’t until a boring fishing trip on Stony Hill Lake that he’d realized where he was going when he left.

♦

Francis was eight years old, and his father rowed him out to the center of the lake to make a few attempts – asked how school was, if he wanted to try any sports. At one point, his dad said, “You know, your mother and I...” But then he couldn’t finish it, as if he couldn’t think of anything that applied to both of them.

For his part, Francis tried to talk to his dad about things that mattered – who was picking on him at school, and the console video game system he’d seen at the store when they were getting his winter coat, and his favorite TV show, but Dad didn’t seem to understand any of it. So after some desultory fishing directions that ended with Dad impatiently baiting the hook and shoving the rod into Francis’s hands, they settled into silence, staring out over the water.

“This is awright, is’nit?” Dad said, at one point. “Two men, out on the water, not needing to talk about anything.”

Francis had already been bored right out of his body when he felt a bright, quick presence. Then two more, and a deeper, slower one. He’d felt things like this before when he went Out, but this time he had his eyes open and was more awake than asleep. He felt forms floating in the space he occupied and in that moment realized that they corresponded, in one way, to what his eyes were seeing.

It was like an optical illusion resolving itself, like one of those Magic Eye books suddenly surrendering its hidden picture. The edges of difference he felt matched up with the light and shadow falling on the water, which meant that... yes, that cool spot there must be the shadow of their boat!

The delight of understanding made Francis sit up straight and blink, and then his father swore at him for rocking the boat, then apologized for swearing. “Guess I’m just cranky ’cause they ain’t biting,” he said. After a pause, he asked if Francis wanted a 7-Up, and Francis said no, and his dad got out a beer.

Francis sank back into the mind of the water, and realized those bright moving shapes had to be fish. He oriented himself in the water with the boat’s shadow and put himself on, or in, or through the dark blue presence. His body up top slowly dangled the worm closer, and his mind down below worked the fish. He didn’t control it, not the way he controlled the RC car his uncle from Maine had given him, before it broke (and before Dad left and the uncle stopped coming around).

It didn’t feel like that. It was more like he knew what the fish was going to do, or had decided to know, and the fish did exactly what he already knew it would. Or something.

Anyhow, he brought hook and fish together and caught a decent-sized bass. His dad looked at him with genuine happiness, real pride, unforced joy for the first time Francis could remember.

♦

After that, it’d been simple to get better and better at it. With practice, you could do anything, and this was the first time Francis had tried to learn something that wasn’t hard (like reading and math) or tricky (like hitting a baseball or riding a bike). He found out he could go a lot bigger in salt water, and that while he could feel inside the fish, whales and dolphins and swimming people were just holes in space, like rocks and boats and pieces of trash. He wondered what that meant, but didn’t think he could ask anyone.

He might have told his dad about it eventually, but Dad left. The fights had eased off after the Stony Hill trip, but when they started again they seemed louder, and worse. Francis caught more and more fish, started competing at the junior level, trying to keep Dad around, but he’d failed somehow.

That had been years ago, and people were no longer impressed. It wasn’t special anymore. Instead of being confused, the kids now just made it one more thing to tease him with. “Hey Icky, you smell like fish guts!” was a typical example. It was just accepted that he’d graduate high school to make his mom happy, or drop out, or flunk out, and become a professional fisherman. Maybe he’d compete at sport, maybe he’d go up to Alaska on the big boats, but those were details.

Pushing himself into the sea, any future felt very far away.

♦

A week earlier, on Friday the fourth, his mom had said, “How come you ain’t got a girlfriend?”

Icke never replied when his mom asked this, which was often. It was afternoon, after school, and he was mixing up batter. They had fish just about every night – fried fish, fish stew, fish fillets, whatever he caught. Icke could never pin down when it started, but as he’d gotten older he found himself doing more and more. After Dad left, Mom deputized him with the cleaning and cooking. She’d acted like it was a togetherness thing, the two of them against the world.

But the bigger he’d gotten, the less she’d done. She’d still put together a chowder now and then, if she had a yen for it, but by seventeen he was doing almost all the housework and cleaning and bill paying. Mom still shopped for groceries, since Icke was too young to buy Crème de Cacao (which Mom drank in coffee all winter) or gin (which she drank in 7-Up all summer) or beer (which she drank year round). He’d kind of hoped, at some level, that the money they saved with him filling the freezer with cod and haddock and speckled trout would come back as some good thing. He was getting old enough to realize that all he’d done was expand his mother’s booze budget.

“I mean it Francis, it’s time you got yourself a girlfriend and stopped moping, got yourself some joy. You’re no prize pig, but water always finds its level. There’s someone out there, most everyone can wind up with
someone
.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Don’t you ‘yes Mama’ me, always ‘yes Mama’ and no action! You’ve got a lot to offer. You’re a good, a good provider, you’ll make a very comfortable living some day. There’s many a girl who’d be happy to get herself someone so reliable.”

“Okay, Mom.”

“So go out there and look! Christ, you’re seventeen, you’re supposed to be a horny devil and I’m supposed to be, to be keeping you
away
from girls, not pushing you out the door! Y’ain’t one of those gays, are you?”

Icke’s ears burned and he peered intently at the batter, making sure to whip out every lump. “No, ma’am.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I don’t know?”

“Too picky, I ’spect. Look, none of us gets exactly what we want in life. The trick is to take what you get and don’t fret. There’s nothing wrong with a poor girl. You find a girl who’s hungry and fill her up with food, she’ll find some love in her heart soon enough. Poor girls can be pretty too, you know, and grateful!”

Icke didn’t answer, but he was thinking about Wendy. She wasn’t poor, and he didn’t think he could get her, and he didn’t think he’d accept anyone else.

♦

After about five minutes of sitting, Icke baited. He was in no hurry. Usually there would be a good number of casual fishermen out on a Friday afternoon, but today was just too cold. That was fine. More for him. There was a good school out by the shoal and he knew they were coming closer. It would be a minute or so before they were in reach. He whipped the line out and waited, letting the float get still. Less suspicious to them if they just came upon it.

When the first fish struck, Icke felt its pain, the confusion of being bitten from inside. There was nothing in it prepared for this. When he pulled, he felt the stretching dark agony run from the mouth through its whole body. He knew that meant the hook was deep enough, so he yanked and then started reeling it in as the others scattered. He wasn’t worried. They wouldn’t go far.

The smothering alien panic when the fish hit the air was familiar too, and the relief when he unhooked it into a wire enclosure dangling in the water. The normalcy of the water sedated the pain from its lip, somewhat. When Icke filled the cage up, he’d pull it out, carry it home with his catch flopping and suffocating, and then one by one he’d behead them with a heavy cleaver on a flat-top stump in the back yard. Some people bashed their fish with boards, but Icke preferred the knife and he kept it razor sharp. It was quicker that way.

Other fishermen saw the sport as a gradual game, or a tranquil pastime, or just a way to get some good eats. To Icke, it was killing. It always had to be. It was too close when he felt it. He couldn’t think of it as anything else.

♦

“Oh, uh, hi,” Francis said.

“Oh. Hi there!” Wendy replied, and Francis thought she might sound a little too cheerful, like she was faking it and didn’t want to hurt his feelings. But he wasn’t good at judging things like that.

It was Monday the sixth, and they were coming out of school. Wendy stayed late for basketball practice. Francis knew she walked home by the back stairway, while the other girls mostly drove. He’d watched the last couple days, waiting for her, as casually as he was able. She’d gone somewhere else those days. But today she was here.

“I was thinkin’,” Francis said. “Um. This Saturday I’ve got a weight-fishing thing, y’know, at Barnes’ Stream. Couple towns south. Anyway, I’ll probably win some money there, I usually do... eh, when I get back, would you... y’know... like to... um...”

“Oh.” Wendy looked off to the left, though there was nothing to see there. “Oh, Francis, no.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“I mean, I don’t...”

“Yeah, I know. It’s no big deal. It was just a thought.”

“Okay then.” She gave him a small brave smile, heartbreakingly sweet and a little sad. Like maybe she wished things were different too.

He watched her walk away, and when he turned around, Wesley was there. Wendy’s older brother.