Upriver
They say he still wears clothes, but he'll take to the water soon._________H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" August - that time of the year when a stillness descends on the land, after the panicked fever-fires of July that ring deafening with bellicose thunderstorms, so all that remains is a quietude, a serenity, a defiance to the arriving blessings of the Harvest, and then the chill that comes with Autumn. It is the last bastion of Summer, season of violence, but the violence is remote from the ears and nigh-hidden from the eyes, it is subtle, but the malice remains. It is the month of stirring ghosts, it is the reminder that October will be soon and with it Samhaim and Halloween, there are murky depths that will be at last deigned to be glanced at - during the remaining warm Elysian months of Spring and Summer it seems as though no darkness can occlude the bliss of the welcome heat, but then arrives August, with its greens that turn to gold when the locust trees become the first of their fellows to change their foliage. That particular part of Virginia is, even to non-natives, glorious in August - the weather is still fine, rather hot but by poolside and lakeside and ankle-deep in creeks, fading to the gentle rhythms of rocking chairs amidst symphonic swirls of crickets and katydids on porches and porticos...it is a charmed life, the Old South still thriving in the growing cosmopolitanism of the area around the enigmatic city of Roanoke, as haunted and esoteric as that city is often rumored to be.. But still the underlying discomfort that August brings moves: it is the month of secrets, stirred to life on a massed subconscious level. On affluent pool furniture and by hiker's campfire and underneath colorful umbrellas in outdoor restaurants are murmured, hinted, whispered, all manner of subterranean things - harmless gossip, perhaps, or something stranger, weirder, more lethal, snatches of a second world unseen by the casual observer. It is a theme explored in curiosity by any sensitive person: what appears to be very often never quite ends up being what actually is...as something as innocuous as a cheating husband, usually, but then there are other things, deeper things, things that leave the listener wanting a stronger drink, because the teller wishes they could remember a little better, and so many details cannot be filled in. The best place to find these stories in that part of Virginia is, without question, Smith Mountain Lake. There is a reason that, for some thirty years, the Lake has been a Southern Riviera, the hideaway for the colonizing Mid-Atlantic elite - it is a place that must be experienced to be believed and to be understood. Words can certainly be put to paper to describe its transcendental beauty, surely as though they will fail: how the vibrant green of the trees drape the rolling-plunging hills of that part of Appalachia and then fade to the mirrored shimmer, the same hue, of the water below them, and how the entire scene fills the eye and forces it to behold a glory of a God that the Baptists, in their stately brick churches that dot the area, still sing about... How and why the Lake, which is not natural and is the result of damming nearby rivers, came to be is not here important - it is a matter of public history and public record - but it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to guess what the region would be like without it, as cloyingly hackneyed as that sentiment now is. Perhaps because it is so new to the landscape - five decades is very new indeed to this immortal Appalachian realm - and perhaps because it is the landscape, ultimately, the Lake has attracted its share of legendry, passed into the collective consciousness of the area, the big towns and the tiny ones, morphing and waxing until it becomes the stuff of ghastly urban legends: the realms of fact and fiction blurred and mixed into something opaque and murky, like the water of the Lake itself. Depending on who you ask, the properties that were flooded by the Lake's inundating waters in the 1960's still stand today, under the sparkling mirror-surface - fishermen would sometimes catch shirts and jackets on their lures from where they had been left in the desolate properties beneath them, and for many years coffins from unclaimed graves in the old churchyards would rise to the surface, and boats would strike them unawares, their gruesome contents exploding out into the water from whence it came, disintegrating putrefied corruption. Certainly it is a fact that there is a very large bridge completely submerged underneath where the Hale's Ford Bridge spans now, at the border of Franklin County and Bedford County. If you are brave enough you can dive and see where it is - lonely and forgotten, but still intact, still there, all iron and concrete and rivets...sixty-eight feet down the Sun is dim, and shines weakly above you. But be careful, for the bridge is now slick and slippery with mud and grime, and it's easy to lose your grip or lose your footing, and there you'll go, deeper, darker, down, down, down... The whole area was, once, heavily wooded, before they built the dam, and along many parts of the lakefloor still stand whole rows of defoliated trees, ghostly, timeless - dangerous, snagging unwary swimmers and divers and trapping them, like a sentient predator, entangling them and drowning them, claiming from the world above for a world below, left to die amidst a nightmare of slime and mud. And in the stillness of the Virginian August air that is filled with the blowsy honeysuckle and raked with the patient wheeze of the katydids, can all this be gleaned in the comfort and safety of an anchored boat, a Sun-parched deck - it is a fond topic of conversation, after all, to find out that God's Country is, in fact, a glimpse of Hellish abyss. But even these little morsels of ghoulishness are not nearly the most interesting of the stories that move, furtive, beneath the placid waters of the Lake - there are more, always more, always stranger. Like - for instance - the disappearance of Michael "Mike" Fischer. Unlike the lingering creep of the other urban legends that cling to the Lake and to its hidden culture, Mike Fischer vanishing is a very real, verifiable fact, backed up not merely by newspaper reports and police inquiries but by many who saw him and knew him and were affected by it directly in those days - the mid-1980's, before development in and around the Lake really took off and left behind it, motorboating away in its wake one could say, the days of peaceful rural life. The events surrounding it are told time and again by people who remembered it firsthand, dispersed into the collective consciousness where it becomes ever more bizarre and twisted, until it last it seems impossible to separate, as the old cliché would have it, fact and fiction. What actually happened to Mike Fischer - his move to Smith Mountain Lake, his glib success in the social circles there, his collapse and his disappearance - are easy enough to piece together, if you talk to the right people, and know how to discern faded memories and half-baked recollections with what actually, really, happened. For it is, after all, one of - but, deliciously, not the most - spectacular pieces of the Smith Mountain Lake mythos. Mike Fischer had been born in Pennsylvania, and was there educated, starting a highly lucrative fueling business out of college with a partner that, the whispers went, he cheated out of success by an underhanded deal. Whether or not that was true was a moot point - at thirty-two he was already a very wealthy and a very ambitious man. He was a slight man with light brown hair that was neatly coifed with the prevailing style, rather unassuming until he spoke in his clear, assertive, confident voice. He blended in, chameleonic, wherever he went. In keeping with what has come to be known as conspicuous consumption of the boomtimes of late era Reaganomics, he found himself wanting to pursue his passion for fishing, evidently oblivious to the obvious symbolism of his surname, but inherited from boyhood. He wanted somewhere that was cheap and different from the dread certainties of the chilly Trans-Allegheny climate, and found it readily when a friend - it's been variously said who, exactly - invited him for a week at Smith Mountain Lake, in Virginia. He soon found himself in love with the area, the spacious scenery, the perpetually fine weather...and the excellent catfishing, and resolved to buy condo in the area at the then-exclusive resort of Bernard's Landing, his visits getting more and more frequent. Mike was known as something of a near-expect on the catfish and how to catch it - he entered tourneys around the area and won at least a few titles, his ingenious ways of detecting and hooking catfish put down to a library of books on the topic coupled with many years of practice. He was said to be the greatest aficionado for cooking that particular fish, and his recipes were sought after for parties and barbecues. Smith Mountain Lake, having an abundance of fish, catfish especially, became his beloved playground. His family, curiously, had some kin in the area, from the supposed town of Monroe that was, so the story goes, left standing after it had been vacated and then flooded by the rising Lake - his mother's name had been Rives, a prominent name from that area that had migrated north with news of steel-related jobs during the Carnegie years in Pittsburgh. Mike constantly heard, and soon grew tired of, the implication that this was a homecoming for him, that his roots had brought him back here, because more than once he had detected a kind of lingering tease with it, something sinister he wanted to ask about but didn't think worth it at the time. At Bernard's Landing he hobnobbed with the top strata, the commanding talented tenth, of the late 80's Virginian and West Virginian kleptocracy, the People You Should Know - he heard that phrase more than once and from more than one person - if you lived in that part of the country, folded in on itself, a constant Reaganesque autofellatio...lawyers, doctors, businesspeople, men and women, mostly but not totally white, spending their idling summer weekends on expensive Sea-Rays and pontoons, immodestly drunk and frankly sexual on the docks in their Sperrys and Lacoste, away from the prying eyes of Roanoke, Lynchburg, Richmond, Charleston, secluded and protected by the geography of privilege, the bounding dips and rises out off the main roads. Privilege itself, for the time and the place, was a fluid concept: it did not matter what color one's skin was - the only color that mattered was the glimmering, fleeting gold, silver, platinum of insatiable capitalist appetite, an exclusive club that one bought, and was not born, into. Their success was always, Mike noticed, barbed with some sort of catch, something that these beautiful people - money apparently bought you good looks as well as boats and condos - unwholesomely ugly: unfaithful spouses, businesses built by backstabbing and lies, the occasional murmurs about someone killing someone for inheritance or spite or ramming a car into a tree blackout drunk. The man who owned the Toyota dealership, for instance, from Blacksburg, who catered to the wealthy Hokie alumni, was invariably coked out of his head - he had inherited his business from his father, and at twenty-six was by far the youngest and worst amongst the assembled decadents: he talked too loud and too much and he was jittery and excitable and laughed at all the wrong times, everyone was annoyed by him and his wife had left him after barely a year and took the kid they had with her but that meant his condo was always open and the parties were wildest there. They were all repugnant in one way or another, they were all dirty and they were all insufferable. The only ones Mike could stand to be around for more than an hour was a man named Lynch who went by "Junior" who owned a chain of c-stores and was there by invitation from one of his suppliers - he had a thick Appalachian accent that veered into being incomprehensible, but he was soft-spoken and didn't drink much and his wife, Susan Anne, always laughed at Mike's jokes...they were always with a man named Archibald Lightfoot who, the gossip went, had enormous, even incredible sums of money hidden away as a family fortune - he was polite and could be charming but he and his wife, who he called Maggie, did not socialize much, and Mike got the distinct impression they thought themselves indisputably better than the maddening crowd there gathered. Mike boozed with the best of them, his favorite drink an inedible mixture of grape vodka and whiskey and soda - he made it himself, and it caught on to a select few who could stomach the strange combination and getting plastered just that fast with that much liquor. They all drank liquor bought at alarming prices and cigars at the upper edge of premium - De Gaspar, from Tampa, by way of Cuba and thus highly illegal - and they did not care about the future, what would happen to them all, tomorrow was a closed book to them, each and every one. Mike Fischer himself would have been just another rich immigrant of no significance, but he was destined for greater things - if one could call it that. And his legend did not really begin until the middle of August, 1987. Those that were there remember it well, even today. One night that month, the party at the Toyota dealer's condo - his name was Jones, luckily, he had zero chance of anonymity but his surname meant that he could do atrocious things and almost sort of get away with it - had gone on unusually long, stretching into the dim hours of the early morning when the Summer constellations still bejeweled the sky overhead, cut through with the sparkling backbone of the Milky Way...you couldn't see that in Roanoke, but out here, God's Country, you could see the skies as they were intended to be seen. Jones' condo especially afforded awing views of the Lake: the vast mountain-peak that brimmed and bristled with trees, the greenish water that reflected it, framed with sloping hills on either side. Now, however, it was all dark - a sable coat thrown over, slumbering to the melody of a cricket's chorus. A little too drunk, Mike had gone out to the dock to sit and sip his drink - grape vodka and whiskey and whatever soda was on hand at the time - contemplating the cosmos. Things weren't going well - his old partner in Pennsylvania had finally figured out a way to take back the company that he had bought out from him unawares all those years ago, there was a letter from his lawyer saying he should probably come back to Bethlehem and sort a few things out before it got any worse...but he didn't want to think about that, he just wanted to look at the stars, and not think about the future which daily grew more uncertain. At some length he was joined by Jones, the host, blondish hair a mop-like mess, eyes haggard, rail-thin from his own bodily self-abuse, but still spry for the hour. He had stumbled, clomping his sockless loafers on the wood, out to see him, and bring him back to the party. On the way back in, a short distance, the two men began to talk about the only subject the two of them really shared: fish. Jones wanted to know how Mike had gotten quite so good at catfishing, and when Mike explained it was just a matter of study and practice, Jones laughed at him and called him a liar. "It's skill and luck!" he roared. "Something you're born with, not practice! I've been at that shit for years and ain't ever had close to what I've seen you catch!" Tipsy but forbearing, Mike entered the house with Smith through the patio and into the downstairs kitchen, the gathered party now privy to their conversation. "I can assure you, Mr. Jones, it's all about practice and knowing what to do." He took a sip of his drink, his glass still in hand. "I have a freezer full of catfish I've caught, you know? And it didn't take anything but a little know-how." "Knowing what to do!" Jones repeated, dubious. "Well I'll tell you what to do--!" He poked his thin finger into Mike's chest. "There's a spot out past Bay Roc, ain't far from here, pretty good catfishing, and that's where you need to go, that's where all the fish are, that's where you gotta be!" "Yeah, you know, I've heard about that place around here but I just don't think--" "Well why ya gotta think!" slurred Jones. Mike observed that the room was favoring him, wanting him to answer to this blathering idiot. "I think I'll go up there and give it a try," he said coolly. "No harm in trying, I guess." "Well ain't this time of year good for catfishing, then?!" Jones threw out his arms. "You oughta go out there tomorrow night! They bite easy at night time." "That's true," Mike said back, because this time of year a lot of cats are out spawning, and they're easy to catch that way unawares. "But not at night - that's a myth, you see, that catfish bite best at night, that's simply untrue, a skilled angler can get them any time of day." The remark drew nods of approval, from those gathered, but Jones, nonplussed and drunk and belligerent, pressed, his abrupt fury welling from his inebriated brain: "Well then prove it! You come up here with some mighty big cats and we'll all see what a good fisherman you is!" For some reason even Mike's acceptance of the challenge was memorable: "Alright then, jackass! Two nights from tonight, we'll have a big catfish grill-off at my place." He slammed his drink down, grinning to the sound of an applauding room. The night ended and those who were sober enough - a slim majority - went back to their respective condos, while many others doing their best to doss down on couches and floors and the sole hammock that was hung outside the patio. Hungover but unwilling to back down from having made such a boast, Mike finally arouse the next later afternoon in his own bed and made preparations for his fishing trip - he bade his friends, the Lynches and the Lightfoots, gathered on the formers' front lawn for some lemonade and sandwiches, a good day, that he would be back by night time with his big haul of catfish to shut that moron Jones right up. The last thing he saw were the four of them raising glasses. "Good fishin!" called Junior. He nodded back at them, and made his way down the hill, to the dock where his fishing boat waited for him. The spot where he was promised immense prospects for catfishing was beyond Bay Roc Marina, which to those unfamiliar with the Lake is a fur piece from Bernard's Landing by boat, reached by going north, then west, in winding waterways that become increasingly narrow, the expanse of open water continuously shrinking until the heavily-wooded shoreline closes in, like a gripping talon ready to snatch away. That part of the Lake is actually more or less part of the Roanoke River, with its silted, rocky sides forming shallows that are lethal to the bottoms of boats - dead center it is deep enough that one can still not see the bottom and still motor down, that green, dappled-reflection water of where the River meets the Lake flowing and guiding. He was far away from everyone - few other boats tread up here with him, the houses whose lights blinked at him, bleary eyes through the trees, too far to call for help if he needed it. He slowed the motor - he was getting close. It was getting to be dusk and the sunlight was dying behind him, all around him, an ambient glow that ached and convulsed in the sky, a red-orange light that exploded from cloud to cloud and held an angelic glimmer over the tiny crests of the wake and waves, blinding glints that lasted for a passing second, and then vanished as his boat moved up, up, past the railroad bridge, that loomed dizzily overhead, into the river. The trees were thick, thicker than he was used to around the lake, and they loomed over him - tall, stoic, verdant sentinels that watched him pass, the groaning whisper of the katydids singing out of their branches. His nose was filled with the peculiar admixtures of boating on the Lake - redolent, of the fetid musk of the unseen skunks, cleansed only partly by the herbaceous woods, and the slow putter of his engine belching out the fragrant pungency of marine gasoline, and everywhere that ineffable smell of the lakewater. Before him he noticed a kind of whirlpool, a gentle breathing indentation in the water, a compression, something moving - he cut the engine and grabbed his fishing gear, smiling to himself, expecting to see, any minute, a large mass of his favorite fish there ready to be caught, gathering in a swarm from the shallows. He took a few cautious steps forward to peer on and get a closer look. But he saw no school of fish - he saw something else. Something worse. It arose from the whirlpool it had made, from beneath, amidst a flurry of bubbles that wreathed about the edge, burbling, boiling, turning the water into a cauldron - and from the surface appeared a fin, webbed, bony, flat, but now rising up, flinging up a spray of water as it flared up, erect and angry: an announcement, a herald, forward go the banners of the king. The fin was flush with an emerging surface, the flesh of the thing itself, scaleless, slimy, filthy, the colour of mud, mud rich with Virginia iron that had been packed into bricks for planter's houses by dying slaves - for it was ancient, more ancient than any man or woman who had laid claim to Virginian soil ere these four centuries of settlement, it had come here, small and unassuming, from a river in antediluvian ages but it waited here, for as long as it needed, for as long as the dam had been here, and grew, and grew, until it attained its titanic shape.
Eyes appeared - bulbous, spherical, but without the dead listless apathy so often of fish, no, even in the dying evening August light, the sunset fading behind him, he could see it, the spark, the emotion, the sheer annihilating malevolence. A massive, domed head, shiny with slippery mucous, breached the surface - four whiskers, a pair on either side, springing up from its face, twitching, seizing, waving about slowly in the August air, testing it, tasting it, sensing the outer surroundings of what was unquestionably its domain. And then lips - the saggy thin lips of the catfish, not in the rhythmic sloppy breath-pulse of its smaller cousins but firm, downturned, unyielding...it was frowning at him. Mike dropped his fishing rod, barely hearing the noise it made on the deck, as he backed away, slowly, stumbling into the upraised seat. "Pretty good catfishing" my ass. This was no fish. This was a monster. It was creature, beast, a phantasm vomited up from every fisherman's worst nightmare, that karmic punishment, that ironic Hell, for lacing its brethren's mouths with spears and hooks and dragging them to the surface to asphyxiate out of the water - a Leviathan, a divine instrument, what the Hebrews hallucinated in their darkest dreams. He made a seizing, panicked motion to turn around and restart the motor - his discretion the better part of valor - when he turned back, one last look, one final parting shot. Later - when he would tell the story - he would say he didn't know why he did it, why he looked, he shouldn't have, he should have just run like Hell and never looked back...but he did. It was gone. Just as soon it was there - it was gone. He breathed a sigh of relief, laughing at himself - what a stupid thing, he thought, there was no monster fish, nothing weird up this river, this part of the Lake, but being alone, and the loneliness, the shadows, the isolation, the anticipation, it all had all messed with his head, he had imagined the whole thing. But then - he felt something. A - bump - some faint pressure at the bottom of his boat. He looked down - he felt it again - a shaking vibration at the bottom of his boat. He grabbed hold of the side, and peered down - the water was still green, dark green, opaque, he could see nothing beneath him, nothing at all. Another bump - harder this time, at the bow, hard enough that Mike lost his balance, nearly falling, but gripping the edge of the boat hard enough to stay on his feet. His head jerked, one way, then another - he dashed to the other side of his boat, vainly searching the water beneath him, vainly seeking what could be doing this. And then he got his answer: A sudden, boiling whirlpool, rimmed with froth and foam, and then it reappeared, the entire thing, all of its bulk, all of its slime, all of its grotesquerie - the giant fucking catfish. His breath was a shudder, the Summer noises of the birds and the insects and the smells of the wood and the Lake all muted, all he could see and sense was the dire malevolence that emanated from the eyes of this titan monstrosity. Mike felt as though he had committed a terrible mistake, something he could not be forgiven for, one false step into the abyss he had stumbled, he would die here, he was sure of it, eaten, swallowed, like Jonah, just like him, prey to this monster, this fish, whose brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers he had spent a lifetime catching, gutting, eating. Jones had no idea - none of them did. They'd all heard the story, Mike had heard it too, big schools of catfish waiting to be caught up here, but none of them had ever bothered to check it out, none of them could ever have known just what the Hell was swimming up here. He and the monster shared a locked gazed - Mike from fear, but the creature from something else, some ineffable rage, some demanding ultimatum that Mike would not, could not answer.
Its back fin swayed, a moving wave that stopped into a splash at the surface, back and forth - its front fins twitched, treading water. And then it opened its mouth. It was nothing at all - some passing seconds before it was fully agape - but it was an instant that stretched out into eternity: Mike saw its maw, ravenous, insatiable, a hole from which nothing escaped, its mouth, so wide and hollowed and ribbed, like a cavern, a bottomless pit, a watery Sheol. Mike's breaths were ragged, choked with horror - all he could was watch, helpless, as the mouth filled, a rushing torrent , with the waters around it, churning in foam, draining into the limitless hole passed from its lips. He had no time to react, no time to process what was happening - full of water, its mouth engorged, the great hidden beast that had swam undisturbed in this Lake and this River spewed it out, all of it, all the water it had drawn out exploded into a spraying deluge of lakewater and phlegm and slime and backwash. Mike screamed aloud, throwing his arms up to protect himself, but he was blinded by it, thrown to the deck of his fishing boat, as the arcing stream of vomited water and nastiness poured over him, onto him, ruining his clothes, soaking him to the skin. It lasted half a minute, no more - the great geyser of whatever that catfish had launched out of its vast mouth, at him, on him. He stood - slowly - trembling, shaking, at once beset with a chill he could not shake, shivering violently in the Summer breezes that made his sodden form cold, so cold, like he would freeze to death there in late Summer on his fishing boat, covered with catfish spit. He blinked, shuffling in his chilled fit to the edge of his boat, looking down into the water that was easing its shimmer with the disappearing Sun - nothing. He shuffled to the other side, his skin clammy and dripping, still, it was though the air was not drying him - again, nothing. The monster was gone. Once again, he was alone. He curled into a ball - and wept. How he got back, how he was able to turn the motor back on and make the long journey back to Bernard's Landing, he didn't tell anyone, because he freely admitted he didn't know - but he remembered, he said, racing, going as fast as the boat would carry him, still slick with the belched-up slime, freezing, trembling, in the dusk air that turned to night. He would tell anyone who would listen this whole story, anyone at all - for the first day, he would repeat it, wild-eyed, nigh-crazed, grabbing hold of random arms or random hands, calling people in the middle of the night, all to regale the time he faced off against a monster catfish that dwelt in the fathoms beneath Smith Mountain Dam. The Laker community was still small and any news was usually well-circulated within days of something happening, and soon all anyone could talk about was Mike Fischer going crazy about his monster catfish, how he didn't bathe anymore and stunk of something rotten and damp, how he would stand at the end of his dock, stark naked, at night time, looking out into the lake, but otherwise never leave his condo, how a few days after his supposed encounter he never said another word to anyone. It was generally agreed that Mike's behavior indicated he had suffered some kind of psychotic break, that he had perhaps seen a catfish of unusual size and thought it to be a real monster, or that he had fancied the whole thing as part of a bursting of nervous anxiety that destroyed his heretofore strong tether on reality. There were calls to get the man help, but they did not last long - still the all-day drunk boating and the all-night drunk partying went on apace, the world did not stop for Mike Fischer or his giant catfish, he may have gone crazy but it would be crazier to stop enjoying the life that would eventually kill them. And why the Hell not? The money was still easy and so was the alcohol and so was the coke. He'll get over it was the common, willfully deluded sentiment - he'll get over it, you know his old business partner from Pennsylvania is trying to get back at him? Big money in that, you know, very big money, maybe even a million on the line, and the case wasn't going well...he probably lost it, he probably had every right to go a little crazy. But then Michael Fischer vanished, without a trace, one late August night. It was his two friends from West Virginia, Lynch and Lightfoot - fortuitously in town that weekend - who noticed his car, that massive tank-like Toronado he drove everywhere, was missing from his driveway. Had Mike finally left his house - back home to Pennsylvania? Lightfoot and Lynch decided to call on the man at last, and told their wives to stay at home, because their shared hunch was that they would not like what they would find, so aberrant and elusive as Mike had been - but they would settle this as a private matter before the police were called. No one answered when they knocked, when they loudly announced they were there - but then they tried the door...which to their shock was open. Into the house they entered - into an appalling wreck, furniture and food and clothes in a chaotic jumbled mess, lamps shattered, silverware bent, everything thrown askew as though in a state of utter derangement, a berserker rage, someone who was desperate and insane and had taken it all out on every possession he owned. And amidst it all - a great livid cloud of miasmatic stench, nauseating and hateful, a punch in the gut when inhaled through the nose...but it wasn't long, moving from the living room and the kitchen, that they discovered its source: It was Mike's bedroom. His bedroom was all catfish. There were his wildly-flung books on catfish, torn-out magazine pictures of catfish, and in the bathtub, floating, disintegrating, slivers of meat and bone, congealed gobs of defrosted caught catfish. Everything smelled, everything was damp, moldy, a must that should not have been there, that should have taken months or even years to grow on his curtains, the clothes that still hung in his closet, the black spidery blooms splattered on his bathroom tile. All over his bedroom wall was drawn primitive little catfish, over and over and over, the same figure, a fat fish with long barbed whiskers, flapping its fins, swimming around the plaster. And in the margins was written a cryptic phrase, all capital letters: WAITSFORME. The little scrawled catfish, and WAITSFORME, again and again and again. The bed was a torn-up pile of fuzz and fluff and cloth, cuts made wildly as though looking for something inside it that would not be found, with the culprit - an antique boning knife - lying nearby, the same blight on his clothes and in his bathroom spreading its spores across the fabric. Whatever had gone on in Mike Fischer's head was impossible to guess, but it was certainly must have been intolerable, something so impossible to deal with it had driven him to depths of quaking madness, that made him filthy and revel in fast-growing squalor...something that throbbed, night and day, something that lived in the shadows of his house and infected the shadows of his mind - all, all, until it destroyed him. But what Mike Fischer seen, or thought he had seen, that drove him to this point? What had made his brain sicken and grow so strange that his grip on reality was loosed in less than a week, what had so violently severed his tether to the real world? What did he think - waited - for him? Maybe it was an abrupt onset paranoid schizophrenia, maybe it was some sort of nervous collapse because of the stress of his business, maybe something latent that attacked him in middle-adulthood - but nothing concrete ever emerged. The more adventurous suggested that he did indeed see something in the Lake, that some monster-fish had attacked both him and his boat, that it was still out there past Bay Roc and that someone should look for and exterminate it - but these were ignored, and laughed, if nervously, away. That same day, the Toronado was found at Crazy Horse Marina - which Mike did not even belong to - a very long distance away, and his fishing boat was found adrift two weeks later, floating aimlessly in the water around the area known as the S-Curve. Something truly awful had happened to this man - and no one has ever discovered why. But just as it has been in life, so in death, for the world kept on, and things moved swiftly: Mike Fischer was searched for over three states, but he was never found - he was declared legally dead, drowned by the same Lake that had charmed him. His business, Fischer Fuels, was offered to his erstwhile friend Junior Lynch, who merged it with his own business to become very wealthy indeed - but he died in a car crash some years later with his wife, leaving a very young son, Bligh Allen, who would be raised by Junior's father, and who was cheated out of a modest fortune by that shadowy old partner of Fischer's from Pennsylvania who outmaneuvered Lynch's lawyers and Lightfoot's hidden treasure to retake the business that was originally his all those years ago. Archibald Lightfoot himself was known to have taken the failure to save his friend Lynch's legacy very hard, and he sold their formerly shared condo at Bernard's Landing, almost a second home to them both, washing hands of the whole matter - the whole thing had become a nexus of tragedy and regret. Jones, for his part, because it was his suggestion for Mike to go and find the rumored bevy of catfish, at last collapsed from the strain of this ordeal and the ordeals he put his body through - he went to California to get clean, and returned, first to Blacksburg and then to an obscure part of Pulaski Country, a hollow, joyless shell, running his Toyota dealership without incident for another twenty-five or so years until he shot himself not long ago one cold Winter morning after his son, Caleb, also went missing in totally different but equally eerie circumstances. Til the day Jones died he blamed himself for whatever - whatever - had happened to Mike. It was a rumor, just a stupid, silly rumor - and it killed him. Mike's condo was bleached and scrubbed and fumigated and hosed down at great expense, sold to an elderly couple from Michigan who kept to themselves - it was as though Mike had never been at all. And it wasn't long before the little circle that had gathered at Bernard's Landing in those far off halcyon days, The People You Should Know, dispersed, worn down with all manner of the maladies that come from aging: cirrhosis, cancer, diabetes, and that most dreadful of all afflictions - children, and even worse, grandchildren. It is often said - a noisome cliché - that what time does to the body and soul are ravages, as though getting older is a series of catastrophes simply by being alive, fires and floods...and yet, seeing the body decay, the glory days fade ignominious into paunch and pastiness, the sting is renewingly fresh each year. Summer turned to Autumn, the all-night party went to bed. Bernard's Landing is now a quiet, well-maintained resort, and the memories of debauchery and freewheeling are an embarrassing memory not spoken or mentioned anymore - except, of course, someplace in private, like over dinner, on the patio of a well-appointed condo. The legend of Mike Fischer passed into the mythology of Smith Mountain Lake, where it created a great sensation for a year or so before it faded and became something of an urban legend, impossible to separate what really happened with speculation and rumor.
At any rate, what had happened was not, in and of itself, altogether outré: an outsider from another state came to the area, he suffered some mental breakdown, made up a story about a fish, then drowned in the Lake - maybe caught on one of the ghostly trees that sits at the lakebottom. People go crazy all the time, people disappear all the time - why should Mike Fischer be treated any different? Because, as it turns out, the story doesn't end there. This seems to have been the start of the hearsay about the very large catfish up by the Dam: gargantuan, went the stories, which were numerous, about those absolutely huge catfish - the size of Volkswagens! - great big ungainly things that hid in the turbines, that lurked and swam amidst the preternaturally still waters near the Dam itself. Not just big, but mean - bloated creatures of the deep that will attack and drive off intruders with their bullying size. Now fishermen's tales are notoriously, even proverbially stretched and unreliable - yet the rumors persist, even today: giant, ugly catfish that lurk somewhere in Smith Mountain Lake, maybe up near the dam, but maybe in the more distant parts, still swimming the bottom, monstrously huge and gross and territorial, waiting, patiently, for the days when they can reign supreme amidst their watery brothers and sisters, the striped bass and the swarming carp and whatever else that swims in the glass-smooth waters. There are some who maintain Mike Fischer didn't drown, but still lives in the Lake - a great big catfish himself, just as angry and just as large, his surname a punchline to an obscenely long joke. But this is all just local angler lore and tall tales - a half-secret churned up from the deep, into the comfortable August sunshine... ...isn't it? That's the trouble with the stories about this area - they're always so inescapably unsolvable, so bereft of evidence and answers, and if you hear the story over drinks you might need something stronger. To that purpose: the drink that Mike Fischer was so fond of is still a favorite around the bars at Smith Mountain Lake - grape vodka, whiskey, a little Sprite: a foul, unbalanced concoction, with a colorful name: Sex With A Catfish, or something equally ribald. But with the years Mike Fischer's favourite drink acquired another, and probably more fitting name around Smith Mountain Lake: Catfish Mouth.