Robert Sampson was frequently cautioned by his parents to avoid reading pulp fiction magazines because “they give you funny ideas.” In the ensuing years he produced nine definitive books on the magazines and writers of the pulp fiction era. Bob’s own fiction has appeared in Weird Tales, The New Black Mask Quarterly, Planet Stories, Science Fiction Adventures, and A Matter of Crime, as well as in the anthologies Spectrum, Spectrum II, Little People, The New Edgar Winners, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction (1989). In 1986 he received the Edgar award for his short mystery, “Rain in Pinton County.”
A former English teacher, radio continuity writer, and technical editor, Bob lived a nomadic existence before settling in Huntsville, Alabama, to work for NASA at the beginning of the Saturn launch vehicle program. “The Silver Face” is based on a camping expedition into Ontario’s hinterland. Bob leaves us to imagine how much of the story he experienced and how much is one of those “funny ideas” his parents warned him about.
They broke camp after breakfast, packing the gear and carrying the bundles down to the boat. Jeff Freeman did what he could to help. But the others, he immediately discovered, followed an unwritten routine, long understood and performed at considerable speed. The sequence of their actions seemed exquisitely sensitive to his interference. His every movement was wrong.
Thornhill pattered past, arms loaded, a coil of thin rope gripped under his arm. “You’ll catch on,” he said cheerfully.
Alex Mathieu, their guide, uttered a derisive snort. He began to load the boat, minutely adjusting each bundle.
Hot with embarrassment, Freeman edged away to stare towards the far shore of the lake. He was a tall, solidly built man in his mid-twenties, unshaven and uncombed, with strain showing around his eyes and mouth. A certain narrow watchfulness was also there, a quickness to seek advantage. That habit of mind did not always show.
The air still smelled pleasantly of bacon and wood smoke and the tang of night-chilled pine. Across the lake a monotonous line of spruce and pine extended as far as he could see on either side. Nor could he see any distance into that forest. A closed mass of dark green limbs faced him. Limbs interlocked, trunk behind trunk, the woods rolled northward toward the Tundra, a shadowed, great, impassive forest, inarticulate warning behind its somber beauty.
The effect was suffocating. He might have been trapped in a long narrow room.
What a fool he had been to accept Thornhill’s invitation. His mind felt cold. He didn’t fish that much back home in St. Paul. So why come to Ontario? Hard to explain such stupidity.
It was forced on him, he thought. What the boss enjoyed, you enjoyed, too. Or you did if you expected to have a future in Thornhill Wholesale Imports. He intended to have that future, even if it required tramping around the wilds.
“But I’m not much of an outdoorsman,” he had told Thornhill.
And Thornhill, dropping his hand on Jeff’s shoulder, grinning his fool’s grin. “You got to try the fishing. His guide does the outdoors stuff. All you do is ride around in the boat.”
Generous Thornhill was. But not a friend, not yet. Between the employer and the employed, the giving hand and the taking, lay a kind of transparent separation, a sensed inequality of position that made friendship impossible, however cordial their relations.
It would be different later.
Some metres offshore, a fish struck through the cold mirror of the water. At the splash, Thornhill looked up from loading the boat. His round face lighted.
“Calling us to catch him, Jeff,” he called. “Just daring us.”
He ambled over and stood grinning at the lake. He was a thick little eager man, big-nosed and with a loosely sagging mouth. He looked coarsely incompetent, a libel on his mind and abilities. On the back of his head, over the bald spot, perched a red and white knitted hat.
“Prime fishing water,” he said to Jeff. “Prime. But there’s better where we’re headed. The best in Canada, can you believe it. I come every year.”
His fat hand gestured east, where the lake widened to a brilliance of silver light. Pines jabbed darkly against a delicate sky the colour of fine china.
“How far?” Jeff asked.
“Day. Day and a half. We have lots of time. No need for you to get back early, is there?”
“Nobody’s expecting me,” Jeff said. Which was the God’s truth. Nobody at all, not since he broke up with Clara. He decided not to think about Clara. “Listen to those ravens holler,” he said.
Thornhill scowled towards the rusty clamour of birds, swarming like fat black flies far up the shore. “Scavenging something. They’ll strip it to the bone, dead or alive. Go for the eyes first.” He grimaced. “Quite bad manners.”
Alex came slouching up, a thick-shouldered man, cold and private, his face scoured by secret broodings. He glared dislike at Jeff. “Wasting light. Best go.”
He stepped silently away. Jeff looked glumly after him.
It was, he thought, going to be an exhausting vacation.
All day the big outboard motor pounded, and the prow sliced often the hissing water. Ahead of them the lake uncoiled. The boat thrust steadily towards a wall of trees that revealed no visible break. Then suddenly that dull green barrier flowed like molten stuff to expose another length of gleaming water, another island capped with pines, another stony headland. The constant instability of the landscape was deeply troubling.
“We’re in a maze,” Jeff said. “No end to it.”
Thornhill laughed. “You keep to the main channel. All these lakes string along rivers. Thousands of kilometres of waterways up here, counting the portages. A man who knows could travel from the Lake of the Woods to Hudson Bay and hardly leave water.”
“What do you do for fuel?”
“Best way is by air resupply,” Thornhill said. “That’s the way I do it. It costs a little, but, Lord, any fool can make money.”
“I must be smarter than I thought,” Jeff said.
Thornhill laughed immoderately and whacked his heavy hand against Jeff’s knee. “Money-making’s just a knack,” he cried. “You’ll learn.” His amusement was intolerably condescending.
Shifting position so Thornhill could not reach his knee, Jeff looked upriver. Not far ahead a flock of water birds swarmed up, a cloud of frantic wings. They emitted a dull hooting, as hollow as a blown jug. What birds they were he could not make out. Their wings seemed thin and long. The flock coiled to a compact spiral of yellow and rose, jarring tropical colours for this dark-hued world.
He watched them swirl from sight above pointed firs. Slow despondency worked in him. He rubbed his forearms. Already the skin felt stiff with sunburn. Once more he thought that he had been a fool to come.
About one o’clock Alex cut the engine and, with indolent skill, glided the boat to rest beside a natural wharf. This was a long shelf of rock, the colour of dirty cream, slanting unevenly to within a foot of the water before plunging sheer into blackness. Small boulders littered the shelf. Jeff braced himself against one as he prepared to disembark. The stone sheared under his hand, spilling a clatter of pieces into the boat.
“More care there,” Alex shouted.
Face hot, Jeff stepped ashore, rocking the boat until the gunnel scraped loudly against the ledge. Alex growled with contempt. The fractured surface of the rock was rusty orange, streaked by dull brown lines. From these oozed a few transparent orange drops, like tears from a broken face.
Thornhill dropped a heavy arm around his shoulders. “Let’s catch a few fish for lunch. Alex can start the fire.”
They collected fishing gear and walked along the sloping shelf. Contorted shrubs plucked at their clothing.
“Old Alex’s a character,” Thornhill said.
“He doesn’t like me much,” Jeff said.
“It’s just his way.”
“You known him long?”
“This is our second trip. But he was guide for a good friend of mine three, four years running. Alex’s a good man. He’s just got his ways, like all of us.”
With graceful economy of movement, he flipped out his lure. Excusing himself, Jeff walked on. To his right loomed the patient immensity of the forest; to his left sighed featureless water, darkly ominous.
He fished. After five minutes of casting, the rod shocked. He reeled against a sullen pulling, excitement sharp in his chest. Just under the surface, a whitish body contorted.
He swung his catch up onto the ledge. It beat heavily against the stone, a fish as long as his forearm but thick and wide. The upper body was dark blue, the massive head sheathed in a blackish carapace. Along its belly and flanks rows of blood-red appendages groped feebly, like embedded parasitic worms.
He glared at the fish in outrage and disgust. It had swallowed his lure, but he felt a strong disinclination to touch the creature. It looked monstrous, a thing that should have been left to its darkness. No amount of pulling could free the lure. Finally he headed back towards the landing, carrying the fish well away from his body.
Before he came within sight of camp, he could hear the sound of quarrelling. Their voices were not loud but intense, forceful, and he understood immediately that they quarrelled about him.
Thornhill’s voice, strained and low, “No, I tell you.”
“Get rid of him.”
“You know why he’s here.”
“I know. Yes, I know. You wouldn’t like what I know, Mr. Thornhill.” The uncontrolled fury of Alex’s voice horrified him.
Thornhill’s voice dropped, his words too blurred to understand. “. . . him and no other. Let him be. You’re . . .”
The intensity of their voices altered suddenly. He felt that somehow they had sensed his presence. Sick shame took him. He stepped briskly forward, kicking aside a dead branch to make casual noise, and came, eyes averted, into camp.
Thornhill and Alex hunched over a pan of frying fish. As he approached they eased apart. Anger coarsened the movements of their bodies.
Jeff displayed the fish. “What is this?” he asked.
Alex grimaced, spat. “Can’t eat it.”
“But what is it?”
“Bottom feeder, some kind,” Thornhill said, voice faintly unsteady. “You catch them now and then.”
“A whiner,” Alex snarled. “Useless. Only a fool’d save it.” Rage made a furnace of his face. “Kill it!” His mouth contorted horribly. Looking insolently into Jeff’s eyes, he repeated: “Kill it.”
Thornhill rose without a word and got the hatchet. As he hacked off the armoured head the thing whined shrilly, the sound of a grieved puppy.
“All kinds of fish in these waters,” Thornhill said quietly. He wiped the hatchet blade with a tissue. “You hear about the bass and lake trout, and the pickerel. But there’s plenty of other things. They’ve been in these lakes since the glaciers. Growing, changing. Had all the time in the world. If a man fished here long enough, couldn’t say what he mightn’t come up with.”
“Be at Small Cascades tonight,” Alex said bitterly into the fire. “Four hours to Left Fork tomorrow.”
“Good, good.” To Jeff, Thornhill said, “Maybe we’ll have a little portage at Left Fork, maybe not. Depends on the water. Then we’re in Sully Lake.”
“That’s where the fishing starts?”
“That’s where it all starts,” Alex said. He looked at Jeff spitefully and lifted the pan of fish.
They camped that night near a small rapids. The muttering and grumbling of torn water got into Jeff’s sleep and splintered his dreams. He found himself standing near a campfire, holding up the disgusting fish, announcing: “This is a monster.”
Alex, by the fire, emitted a snuffling thick laugh. “Got no monsters here,” he said.
Consciousness returned.
Jeff’s face felt chilled and his heart pulsed heavily. The immense sky flared with stars. Finally his heart slowed.
He thought of Clara, the resilience of her clothed breast under his fingers, her eyes half-closed, the unsteadiness of her breathing.
“Wait a minute.” Her voice gone strange. Sitting up, she removed her shoes, reached behind her neck to unfasten the gold necklace. “Want to undo me?”
Something knotted beneath his heart. “Wait!” Drew her against him, gripped her tender back against his chest, locked his hands over her fingers, holding her. Not moving. In terror of her. Afraid. His mind chattering. Listening to his irregular heart.
Time ground on. At last she moved away from him, found her shoes, made coffee. They sat with the table between them, shame in his cup. Shame galling his mouth. He did not know why he could not lift his hand to open her dress. Only that fear stunned him. And afterward the long, remorseless humiliation of memory.
An aching syllable twisted from his mouth. His body knotted in the blankets. Overhead the glittering Ontario sky; under his shoulders the firm Ontario earth. Turning his head, he saw Thornhill kneeling beside him, hand pointing towards the lake. Behind tangled limbs, at perhaps twice the height of a man, rocked a dull silver shining. He could not quite make out what he was seeing. It seemed a luminous rectangle, marked darkly as the moon is marked. A face, he thought; a blind silver face. It searched toward him through the branches. He could hear the sound of breathing.
Consciousness returned.
Stars like bits of frost and the solemn mutter of the rapids. Fear built an aching hollow at the centre of his body.
In the morning, he carried towel and toothbrush to the lake edge. He felt sweaty and unrested and when he heard Alex tramping towards him he quietly retired behind a thick pine. The guide strode past, crunching across the litter on the forest floor. When he had gone, Jeff stepped from behind the pine.
To find himself facing Alex, no more than an arm’s length away. Contempt came out on the guide’s face like escaping flame.
He said, harsh-voiced, “I know what you do with him.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know what you are. It stinks out of you. I smell it.”
Jeff said, “You’ve had it in for me since we started.” He threw down his towel.
His blow was caught by a hand that gripped like a metal clamp. “Fight you?” The guide rammed him back against the pine, holding him with no apparent effort. “Not you. Maybe you like your tongue and eyes pulled out? I know you.”
His face came close, brown eyes huge, mouth shaking. “I smell you,” Alex whispered.
He stepped back.
Jeff did not move from the protection of the tree.
Alex spit violently and moved away. His footsteps made no noise among the crisp branches littering the forest floor.
The boat rushed onward through bright morning.
In the forward seat Jeff slumped, his mind scalded by rage and shame. At the motor Alex sat stiffly erect, intent on private angers. From his position on the centre seat, Thornhill chatted brightly until their silence defeated him, and he too became silent, sitting slack-mouthed, fingering his lures.
The lake shrank to a narrows and became a shallow flow, more rock than water. Above its surface floated a thin mist smelling of citrus and wet weeds. Brush tangled the banks. Inland rose a forest of spruce and fir. Among the trunks scattered great stones, like skulls on an ancient battleground.
Thornhill cleared his throat violently. “This is the feeder stream from Sully Lake,” he told Jeff. “A couple of hundred metres of wet rocks.”
Branches closed off the sky. Insects whined at the men’s faces. On either side projected grey ledges of granite splotched by orange and yellow lichen. The stream narrowed and more boulders showed in its bed. At last Alex shut off the motor and elevated it.
“Now we push,” he said.
Jeff swung over the side into frigid water up to his knees. They began walking the intractable mass of the boat forward against the thrust of the water. At intervals, the belly of the boat rasped bitterly along hidden stone. When finally the stream became too shallow, Alex took a painter over his shoulder and began to haul the craft forward, the others pushing on either side.
Ahead of them, in the thickening mist, tones of grey and white indolently eddied one into the other, as if some great transparent shape moved steadily ahead of the boat and the straining men. The footing was treacherous. It was a slow, clumsy, exhausting struggle.
Jeff’s chest ached and the breath burnt in his throat. Again he was being tested. Again without warning. As if his failure with Clara had triggered a cascade of trials he dare not fail. Against the dead resistance of the boat he flung his full strength.
Lethal to fail here. Lethal.
Fine gravel and mud underfoot. The water became no more than shoe-top deep. Alex shouted hoarsely, “Now. Give some muscle. Now.”
Miraculously the boat became lighter. Jeff plunged unexpectedly into icy water above his waist, and Thornhill was saying breathlessly, “Not as hard as last time.”
They climbed back aboard. Alex swung down the motor. Jeff flopped onto his flotation cushion, strain shaking his arms and legs. The lake shores began gliding past.
Some squat animal, frightened by the engine sound, burst from a tangle of dead branches and plunged heavily into the lake. Jeff only glimpsed it from the corner of his eye, but he had a sudden shocked impression that its head had been thorned with horns.
He sat up, looking sharply around him. The animal did not reappear.
Thornhill waved at him. “Welcome to Sully Lake,” he bawled. “We’ll camp in half an hour. Then you’ll really see some fishing.”
But there were no fish. Their lines returned unchallenged. All that afternoon they cast along the banks and trolled the edge of the main channel. They found nothing.
“Right at dusk, that’ll be better,” Thornhill said as the boat returned to camp.
At the stern, Alex’s face twisted in a fierce private grin.
Once back at camp, Jeff found the tensions between them unendurable. Thornhill sat glum and silent. Alex was ostentatiously busy and silent. Finally Jeff picked up a rod and tramped through the forest to a section of shoreline they had not fished.
Breaking through a tangle of low juniper, he came out upon a ledge of pinkish granite. Behind distant trees, ravens shouted harshly. To his disgust, he saw that the water was shallow. The bottom, sandy brown and roughly textured, was not half a metre under the surface.
Dropping the rod, he flopped down on the ledge. He yawned and rubbed his eyes. Light breezes shivered the water, giving the effect that the lake bottom was sliding slowly past. That hateful scene with Alex began to replay itself in his mind. So intensely humiliating was the memory that, at first, he did not realize the bottom was indeed in motion. That it slipped past him in implacable, silent movement.
He found himself crouched on the ledge, fingers white against the stone.
Earth slip! he thought.
But it was not that. No jarring, no grinding of strata. Only that noiseless passage an arm’s length away. He could not tell how far out it extended or what it was. It was simply an immense gliding movement under the transparent water.
After an extended time, he saw the back edge of it pass, an irregular surface streaming translucent brown tatters.
Fear took hold of him. He found himself plunging frantically through the juniper, dodging among granite boulders to scramble up a slope slick with fallen pine needles. For terrible moments his mind reported that something merciless reached toward his back.
He sprawled gasping in the protection of a pine’s rough trunk.
Nothing that big could be alive. It was a current of suspended clay particles, a moss colony, a mat of waterlogged branches and algae. It was an explicable thing of the natural world.
When he was no longer shaking as much, he crept forward and carefully peered down the slope towards the lake. At about the place he had been sitting, a tall column projected from the water. It was the silver grey of a weathered snag, smooth and featureless, tapering to a flattened tip.
As he watched, it bent forward, boneless as an elephant’s trunk. Brush crackled as it fumbled along the shore. Its movement shocked the water to ripples.
Dinosaur, he thought, nauseated with fear.
But it was no dinosaur, either. The searching thing had no eyes. He could see no head at all, only dim markings high on the column that suggested the presence of a face.
With infinite leisure it picked among the rocks on the shoreline. Finding nothing, it sagged quiescent among the bushes. For a period, it lay motionless. Then abruptly it retracted from the ledge, and sank silently into the dark heart of the water. He had the impression that a dwindling silver face looked back toward him.
Eddies spun on the lake surface.
Jeff rolled over and regarded the sky. He felt light and sick. But the panic had left him and reason’s cold net slowly extended itself across his mind. That underwater moving thing and the questing thing linked in his mind and became one. Whatever it might be, dangerous or not, it was a natural thing in a natural world. That being so, it would have certain limitations. If it were too strong to face directly, you could get around it obliquely.
Like Alex, he thought. Alex was powerful and likely crazy, but he could be dealt with. No need for direct trials of strength. Keep away from Alex.
Keep back from the lake. Look for the oblique way.
He moved toward camp, man moving through a rational world. Feeling fear like stinking smoke drift across the coldness of his mind.
At camp, he explained what he had seen. Neither Thornhill nor Alex was skeptical, neither horrified.
Knew about it all along, Jeff thought. His mind picked at their motives as he sat watching them eye each other.
Thornhill sighed. “So now we got to do something.”
“Something!” Alex jeered. “You know what something.”
Thornhill said glumly, “I suppose so.”
“Do it! You know you’ll do it. So do it!”
“We best wait for dark,” Thornhill said glumly.
“Dark, light. All the same,” Alex growled.
Their cryptic conversation made no sense. But Jeff felt alertness move through him like sudden wind.
Thornhill said to Alex, “I’ll need your help.”
“Not me,” Alex said. He regarded Thornhill with hard amusement. “Your plan. Your choice. You do it.”
Picking up the hatchet, he showed his teeth in a bleak grimace that was not a smile. “Dig your own bait. I go cut wood.” He drifted off into the woods and was gone.
Thornhill looked after him. The foolishness had melted out of his face, leaving it taut and alert. “This changes things,” he said.
He scowled over unpleasant thoughts, kneading thick fingers together. Then he waved Jeff to a seat beside him.
“We better discuss this,” he said.
“The thing’s too big to handle,” Jeff said. “Best for us is to find another lake.”
Thornhill rubbed his mouth on the back of his hand. He said, “I like you, Jeff. You’re ambitious. I like that.”
His hot hand gripped Jeff’s knee. “I want you to know, you have a future with Thornhill Imports. I see a profitable time for both of us. You’ve got a good mind. So put it to work on our problem here.”
His hand moved away and one thick arm wrapped Jeff’s shoulders. “Now the thing is, what that lake thing wants, you see, is a life. That’s all it needs. Just one. A tribute to it, so to speak.”
Jeff twisted to look at the fat face close to his. With a feeling of profound disorientation, he saw that Thornhill was completely serious.
“Tribute?”
“Necessary, I’m afraid. Quite so. That’s the key that unlocks the wealth of Sully Lake. Muskie beyond counting. Trout. Can you imagine trout longer than your arm, heavier than you can lift? But before you take, you have to give.”
Jeff attempted to shake off Thornhill’s embrace. He said sharply, “That’s what you brought me here for? For tribute?”
Thornhill nodded regret. “I didn’t know you as I do now. I can’t part with you now; I’ve learned you’re too valuable. When you find a valuable man, you keep him, no matter what. We’ll make a fine team, you and I. Fine.”
The weight and heat of Thornhill’s embrace was nauseating. Some remote part of Jeff’s mind registered humiliation and rage at being touched this way.
He said thickly, “That leaves Alex. Alex is not, perhaps, indispensable.”
“Good God, Thornhill!”
“Two men can work the boat nicely. I know the channels back. That isn’t the problem. The problem is to offer a live tribute. It must be live.”
“That thing’s enormous,” Jeff said. “One life couldn’t satisfy it. A battalion wouldn’t be enough.”
“One. Only one. It’s quite simple. Man in boat. Let the boat float out a few lengths. Wait. And afterward the fish come.”
“My God,” Jeff said. “Afterward the fish come. Like how many times before?”
Twisting to his feet, he got distance between them. “No!” he said.
Thornhill rose and stepped toward him, hand extended. “Listen, my boy—”
“Don’t paw at me. This is crazy, Thornhill.” He stepped away from that imploring fat hand. “Look, let’s go try our luck again. The fish should be rising.”
“I am bitterly disappointed,” Thornhill said.
He fumed as if going towards his fishing gear. Instead he struck Jeff violently on the side of the neck. The woods became dark and Jeff fell on his knees. He could not breathe. Another blow high on his check sprawled him on the ground. Thornhill’s weight plunged across him.
“Sorry,” Thornhill’s voice cried. “Too bad.” An arm crushed against Jeff’s throat. A hand clutched his genitals. Suspended above him hung Thornhill’s face, the loose mouth open.
“Please listen . . .” gasped Thornhill.
A hand closed over that staring face and jerked it away. Thornhill’s weight lifted from his chest. Sudden violence began, limbs beating and flailing tumbling bodies. Attempting to sit up, Jeff was struck across the face. Driven backward, he fell outstretched, striking his head. He struggled up, tasting blood. Saw he had fallen among a strew of small logs. Among them lay the camp hatchet. His mind methodically registered that Alex had returned and thrown down logs and hatchet.
Frantic squealing. Violent continuous rapid pounding. Jeff found himself kneeling an arm’s length from Alex’s wide back. The guide wore a blue checked shirt and he straddled Thornhill. His shoulders bent and strained. His hands kneaded Thornhill’s throat. Thornhill’s heels flailed beige dust from dull red pine needles.
“So now,” Alex shouted. “So now you kill me, too, liar?”
He hammered Thornhill’s head against the ground.
Jeff picked up the hatchet. Without thinking, still kneeling, he lashed the butt end of the blade against the back of Alex’s head.
Alex’s body went loose. He collapsed sideways, his body partially covering Thornhill, and his legs and arms began a terrible trembling and twitching, as if electric current convulsed him.
Jeff tried to get up. He lost balance and fell hard, losing the hatchet. For a single, horrible instant it seemed that Alex had rolled erect and rushed at him, both hands extended. He could not find the hatchet. Confusion blurred his eyes. He found himself crouched, gripping the hatchet in both hands, yelling incoherently.
Alex’s legs jerked.
Trapped beneath the guide’s bulk sprawled Thornhill, chest heaving. Blood from his nostrils smudged the greyish stuff of his skin.
Jeff lurched over to Alex. He stood swaying, balanced on treacherous legs. At any moment, the guide would reach up and grip his hand and pull him down and tear at his face. With a kind of defiant shout, he clutched Alex’s shoulder and heaved the man off Thornhill. The front of Alex’s trousers was blackly sodden.
Jeff pushed up one of the guide’s eyelids. A brown eye looked coldly into his own. After long hesitation, he touched the eyeball. When he took away his fingers, the eyelid remained partly open.
Harsh breath rasped in Thornhill’s mouth. He seemed unconscious. Jeff carried the hatchet across the camp site to the tarpaulin covering the fuel cans and non-edible supplies. There he found the coil of thin rope and hacked off pieces.
With these he tied Thornhill’s legs and bound his hands behind his back. By the time he finished this, Thornhill’s eyes had shuddered open.
“Don’t do this,” the fat man said.
Jeff dragged him towards the boat. Thornhill twisted and rolled. Thin, wild noises tore from his mouth.
“I’ll club you, if I have to,” Jeff told him.
Thornhill became still. In a strangled voice, he said, “You’ll never find the way back.”
“I’ll never go,” Jeff said. “Sooner or later, a provincial police plane will fly by. I’ll have the biggest signal fire in Ontario ready for them.”
He laughed. And was horrified by the lunatic ring of his own voice.
As he lashed Thornhill to the seat, the fat man said, “No need for this. Let it have Alex.”
“Alex’s dead,” Jeff said.
“Kill me now,” Thornhill said. “You owe me that, Jeff.”
“Since when?” Jeff said.
He threw his weight against the boat and grated it off shore. As it drifted away, Thornhill began to cry. He lay face up, not moving, pale ridges of muscle around his open mouth, eyes shut, eyes flowing. When the boat was far out of reach, Jeff realized that he had forgotten to tie on the drag rope. He had no way of pulling it back.
Tomorrow, he thought, after this’s all over, I’ll swim out for it. Tomorrow. The thought of entering the water made his bones sick.
And also tomorrow he would have to bury Alex. Early in the morning. Otherwise the ravens would be all over him. As they would be all over Thornhill, if his body remained in the boat.
So much to do. Which was all to the good. He did not intend to think about the decisions he had made. He would accept them. For once in his life, he would not second-guess himself, but accept what was done, whyever, however, and get on with living. It occurred to him that he would like to see Clara. To his pleasure, he found that he could think of her without an accompanying flush of guilt. He wondered why.
Twilight had thickened to darkness and the sky tingled with small, piercing stars. From the dark mass of the boat, floating parallel to the shore, came the sound of weeping. The water magnified the sound. The slow cadences of that sobbing spread across the lake, filled the spaces between the trees, expanded through the sky. Universal lament.
But Jeff was not listening.
Quite silently, a silver-white column had lifted from the lake. It towered so close to him that he might have stroked it with his hand. Stiff grey stubble sprinkled the rough-textured skin. It smelled strongly of citrus.
High above him, the column tapered to a flattened tip, grooved and creased, patched with dull silver skin that suggested a face.
He was terribly afraid. His mind observed that he stood beside his death. An astonishing fact. Arrived with no warning at all, suddenly there, the implacable thing. However he might dodge or twist or creep, it would finally have him. But he would prefer not to dirty these final seconds by wiggling in the dirt. It would be unforgivable to shame himself.
Faint tremor shook the fleshy column. The silver face bent over him. He could almost recognize it.
“Is that all you are?” he said.
It struck so rapidly he did not see the movement. The blow smashed him against the ground. More than a dozen stinging cells plunged into his body. Nearly at once paralysis gripped him and he felt his mind blur and slow. Before his thoughts became random, it seemed that he was floating in a dim warm light.
The blunt tip hovered irresolutely over him, fumbling at his head and body. Then it entered his broken chest to inject some thousands of its spawn; during the slow liquefaction of his body, these would multiply and clump together, layer on layer, until the characteristic flattened mat of the mature colony was formed.
When injection of the spawn was complete, the tip began coating the body with foam. At first, the delicate stuff shone like reflections on polished silver. Within half an hour, the foam hardened to an opaque grey mass. This the fleshy tip teased into the lake.
The grey column, silver face, and foam mass sank into the polished water with little more disturbance than a retraction of shadows.
Weak ripples faded against the shore.
Only Thornhill’s distant sobbing fretted the darkness.
Near dawn a great trout, glistening like new metal in the starshine, erupted from the lake. At the height of its leap, its body arced exuberantly. It plunged back through the sleek surface of the water with a silver crash.
The game fish had returned to Sully Lake.