Carp Diem

A place of half-shadow, and a thing made of scales and silence.

CARP DIEM

by

Susurrant Horror

The river coursed through a tangle of vines and darkness, to God knows where. Sometimes it felt like nobody knew or considered where the river might end. It always seemed like the light here, at this spot, itself was swallowed and feasted upon as the water ebbed away: maybe it was delivering that poison elsewhere. Pooling into some dark kingdom, far away, like black ink.

But here, the light was just enough. The place where the light wasn’t dead, but dying. I liked it. A halfway place. I don’t think I ever had the words for it. Words were never my thing – I’d spent long enough trying to stay away from the need for them. But maybe the air was speckled with light, here. Crystals of it. Each hanging bough into the water was a finger, testing the heat. Tasting the death. Every crag, and knot of wood, was a half-shadow. I thought I’d seen voles and rabbits, but only ever the shadow of them, too. Everything was half-shadow. I was half-shadow, here.

That’s all I needed to be.

It was quiet, and the quiet didn’t expect anything of me.

Even my line and bait seemed to splash noiselessly into the coursing water-blood of this place.

I couldn’t remember catching anything. Some part of me, in the silent hours of the night, wondered what a thing might look like, if it were dredged up from this river. Would its scales be half-shadow, too? Glistening like the promise of night?

Here, I didn’t want for anything. And nobody needed anything of me.

I’d never seen anyone else here. This exact spot was mine. The willow tree was gnarled and its long, silver leaves tapered down like slippery tears. It was an odd shape, that tree: half exploded outward as though it’d been thundered apart, once upon a time. Now it looked like its innards were protruding. It was half dead, but it was alive. I had used that tree as a nook for so many years; a cozy place of refuge.

I had fished there, I think. I recalled distantly, the hook – piercing flesh and scale. Had it run red and fleshy? Perhaps. It felt so long ago now that there had been anything at all. The waters were dead.

In the silence, I didn’t know what I thought about. The air hummed distantly with the sound of bugs, but I never really saw anything living.

Until I did.

There was a little boat. I think it had always been there. A remnant of another time, and someone else’s life. It had dredged itself and splintered into the ground, and a lattice of moss had festered across what remained of its surface. The forest and the river had half-gorged on it, and what persisted of the thing continued to taste the lip of the ever-rushing water.

I had never seen a living creature touch that boat. The thing had been gone from my active thoughts for so long: it felt as part of the landscape. As though it had never existed as its own thing, and was just subsumed by this place of lingering.

Fingers crept up from the water.

The boat was close – it always had been – and I could see the form of those fingers. The blue of lividity, and shimmering strangely. At first, I did not process them as fingers: they were simply the water of the river, compiling itself into a new and bizarre shape.

But the fingers emerged further. They were not water. Nor was the wrist that followed, coated in dangling moss and plant-viscera.

My heart thrummed, though my head was cloudy and strangely silent. Here, in this place, I had only half-thoughts.

Something gurgled, and a shiver cascaded up and down my spine. The sweat of the afternoon heat suddenly chilled.

The gurgle was at first a wet splashing of nothing, but soon resolved into a voice. A strangling and strange voice which mingled with the sputter of the river. “A strange creature indeed.”

A strange creature indeed.

What did such a thing mean?

“Show yourself.” My voice was half smothered by the voice of the river, but it carried.

The thing complied, and I had wished that it didn’t.

It was a fish; or something like it, emerging over the old and broken wood of the little boat. It was radiant in silver, but lacerated with black cracks. And that face…

Malevolent. Bloated. Uncanny. Smears of red-pink, the inside bursting out. It was squat, and made of roiling moss and pebble and bursting blue vein. If it was human-like, then the humanity of it was faint indeed.

The mouth itself was fish-like and small, and ancient water trickled out from that orifice, fountain-like, as the thing spoke its gurgle. “What brings a strange creature to this place?”

I bristled.

This thing – this fish – should terrify me, and yet there was an absence and idleness in my thoughts. An unusual passivity. I was not shocked, per se: merely bothered that it interrupted my quiet reverie.

“I come here from time to time. For the quiet.”

The fish-thing’s fingers wrapped more firmly across the lip of the boat. “And it has found my boat.”

I frowned. “That boat has been there for years.” I considered further. “And what manner of creature are you, anyway, that would need such a boat? Are you not fish?”

Its eyes assessed me, shimmering and pallid – like prized bone china. I could be lost in those eyes.

I began to wonder if I was lost in those eyes.

“The boat is a remnant. This place collects remnants.” Though I was not shocked by the creature itself, a knot formed in my stomach as it began to navigate across the wood. It hitched itself up and I saw that, like its strange homunculus fingers and wrists, it also had nascent feet and toes. I saw something else, too: at first glinting in the strange light, but dissimilar to the suit of scales. Something metal…

A hook.

The thing was an abhorrence. An abhorrence from my memory.

“Well. Be off with you, then. Sail away on your remnant-boat.”

I sounded bitter. I didn’t know why. I wondered about the dark places, and the journey into oblivion that the river would take. I wondered where this creature would find itself.

The creature raked at the accumulated moss with its almost-fingers, gurgling low and absently. “The strange creature is strange because it doesn’t know. But it must taste this place. Must sense it.”

I shook my head in denial at the thought that I might know anything about this strange creature. About this place.

About this quiet.

About the half-shadows of life here.

I should turn. There was a place in the half-split tree, that had been my refuge for so long. That I had come to, for solitude.

Nobody knew of this place. It had always seemed connected to another world. It was just me. And only me – and the fish, of course – once upon a time. I came here for the quiet…and to be away from people. But how long had I been here?

The fish-thing had finished scraping and indicated to the tree, as if sensing my own thoughts. “It is a remnant, itself.”

I shook my head, but the denial could not save me from the truth which pierced like splinters of bone.

It was bone.

My bone.

I faltered at the creature. My voice now seemed more insubstantial than it ever had been. “How…?” How to ask the question. “How long?”

The thing shrugged. “A strange thing to ask. Bone is bone. Death is death. Once there isn’t life, there’s only death. That’s all.”

I nodded.

The creature indicated to the boat, and I blinked in confusion and thought. “Did you come here for me? How did you know I was here?”

The thing shrugged once more. “I liked the quiet, too. But this - it’s not a journey to take alone.” Suddenly its face seemed less bloated, and the shimmering scales were exquisite. “We can be remnant together. Strange remnants.”

I half-smiled, at this. Whatever this creature was, we might face the end of the river together, and leave behind our scales and bone, gleaming in the light.