LINDEMANN’S CATCH
ROD SERLING
The fog and mist that rose up from the sea drifted over the wharves, spindly docks, and broken-down jetties, to mix with the gaslight over the cobblestoned streets. It slipped through the reefed sails and riggings of shabby little fishing boats, as if beckoned to by the distant frog-call of a foghorn and faraway ship’s bells that rang out nervously as they groped through the night.
There was a big, orange, roaring fire in the hearth of the Bedford Village Inn, and the sporadic crack of burning logs mixed with the clatter of mugs and low voices of the men in the room. They were mostly local fishermen and a few sailors on leave from whalers—all men of the sea who sensed the tension of the fog-shrouded night and sought out each other’s company in an unspoken thanksgiving that on that particular night they could anchor themselves to a tankard of rum instead of peering with aching eyes from a crow’s nest, wondering at what death-filled moment they would strike a reef or a hidden shoal.
Mordecai Nichols, the town doctor, stood near the bay window of the inn, looking through a spyglass toward a distant promontory that angled out from the shore in a clawlike curve. He saw the faraway sails of a ship just moving past the farthest spit of land. He lowered the spyglass just as the inn’s owner, a wooden-legged former sea captain named Bennett, moved past him with a tray of mugs.
“Looks like a lugger, doesn’t it?” Nichols asked, pointing toward the window.
Bennett picked up the spyglass and briefly looked through it. “Too square in the stern,” he announced, “and she’s ketch-rigged. Trawler of some kind. And she better put some water between her and the coast, or she won’t be seeing Boston this trip.”
“She’ll not make Boston.”
Both men turned to look at Abner Suggs, who, as always, played solitaire at a distant table. Suggs had an emaciated, skeletal face and a look of perpetual worrying disapproval. He returned the look of the two men with intense, challenging eyes.
Nichols took a step toward him. “Who says?” he asked.
Suggs pointed to the cards and shrugged. “The cards.”
The doctor winked at Bennett. “Where do they put her down, Master Suggs? I mean—those cards.” He moved closer to the table. “Will she hole her bottom on a reef, or strip her sails in a gale?’’ He picked up one of the cards and looked at it. “Don’t any of these damned cardboard squares offer anything but disaster?” He flipped the card back onto the table. “Cross-seas, swamped hulls, and man overboard—I swear, Suggs, that’s all we hear from you.” He pointed to the cards. “Is there not one single cheerful prediction in that net of doom you weave every night? Is there no good fishing? Light winds? Maybe a keg of treasure washed into this benighted little place to make our lot a little easier for a change?”
Suggs’s head seemed to hunch down into his shoulders. “I simply tell what the cards say,” he said glumly; then he blinked and tried to lighten his voice. “What about your fortune, Doctor? In the cards—or in your palms. For just the price of a short brandy or a spot of rum. Maybe I’ll see a fortune coming for you.”
Nichols laughed. “A fortune for me? Most likely you’ll see a bony rider on a pale horse coming for me.” He coughed and pounded on his chest. “Fog and damp and chill! Ask your cards how I survive my patients.”
He moved back over to the window, staring out at the fog. “‘Physician, heal thyself,’” he said softly, “or so it is said. But not in this bloody place!”
There was a sudden quiet when the door opened and Hendrick Lindemann entered. He carried with him an unspoken command into the room, only barely acknowledging with a slight nod the greetings of the men clustered around. He was a big man, well over six feet, his strength and bigness not even remotely hidden by his bulky slicker, now wet with fog and sea spray. He moved over to the bar, throwing back the hood of his slicker, to reveal the gold stubble of a light beard on a face in which wet, cold, and sullen bad humor gave battle to handsomeness. He moved directly ever to the bar, nodding to Bennett, who stumped over on his wooden leg to serve him.
“Just coming in?” the innkeeper asked him.
Lindemann nodded and pointed to a bottle of rum.
“How was your catch?” Bennett asked as he poured the rum.
“Too light,” Lindemann said. “Some undernourished cod and a few dead shiners. Filthy catch—filthy night.” He took the rum and downed it in a series of noisy, thirsty gulps, then held out the mug for Bennett to refill.
“See a ship out there ?” Dr. Nichols asked him, coming up to sit alongside.
Lindemann nodded. “Two-master. Too shallow of draft and too big of sail. And badly skippered—too busy shifting ballast to look where she was going. Almost ran me down.” This time he finished half the rum, then placed the mug down. “But in keeping with the night’s sport,” he said thoughtfully, “hopeful idiots like myself—to be killed by fearful fools.”
“Captain Lindemann.” Suggs’s voice, shrill, unpleasant, and persistent, snaked across the room. “Perhaps the cards offer up a better future for you.” He rose from the table, and with a smile that oozed from him like snake oil, walked diffidently toward Lindemann. “Or on the palms of your hands,” he continued, “maybe a windfall on the way. Or the tea leaves, Cap’n. Let me read the leaves for you. Now, there’s many a pretty picture painted for a man in the bottom of a cup. Or would a potion of a sort interest you? I’ve got ancient bottles that are the perfection of the soothsayer’s art.” He stood there like a famished little gnome—lips wet, hands twitching, his eyes hungry little orbs that seemed desperate to devour anything they saw. He placed the cards on the bar.
Lindemann looked at them for a moment, then very slowly scooped them up. “Mr. Suggs,” he said in a soft voice, “I have to live with the fog, because it’s hell’s blanket, and it creeps up through the earth to bedevil seamen like me. And there’s nothing I can do about that. And I have to sail on that leaking rat catcher of mine because there’s not a damned thing on heaven or earth that’ll change that. I’ll go out every freezing morning and I’ll come back every wind-screaming night with just enough in my net to keep me alive.” He held the cards out in front of him. “Now, all this is my miserable lot, Mr. Suggs, and it will be until God decides to cut bait, turn my sail into a shroud, and throw me back into the sea. But what I don’t have to do”—he dropped the cards into the cuspidor at his feet—“is to come in here night after night and look at that wormy little face of yours and listen to that bilge about potions and palms and tea leaves.”
He reached out, grabbing Suggs by his dirty shirt front, and yanked him off the floor with one incredibly strong hand. With the other he pointed toward the spittoon. “That’s where your fortune is, Mr. Suggs. Where men spit.”
He held Suggs out at an arm’s length, while the little man wiggled like a speared fish and the onlookers laughed and exchanged winks. Then he slowly lowered him to the floor, where he stood, eyes averted, face burning.
Suggs’s voice shook in a combination of rage and fear. He looked down at the cards spread around the floor, some of them still protruding from the spilled brass pot at his feet. “You had no call to do that, Cap’n. . . .”
“Didn’t I now?” Lindemann’s voice was steady and almost gentle. “Well, now, Mr. Suggs—now I’ll tell your fortune. No charge to you. With my compliments. For taking up my time, you’re going to wind up on your back with a bloody mouth.”
His big hand left his side, the back of it connecting with Suggs’s cheek, the sound of it like the sharp crack of a rifle.
Suggs was propelled backward, hitting his back on the side of the bar, then rebounding off of it, to land face first, crunchingly spreadeagled onto the floor, one hand knocking over the cuspidor, which spilled over him as he lay there dazed—blood, drool, and tobacco juice a stinking porridge rolling down his face.
It was Dr. Nichols who helped raise him to a sitting position. The doctor’s voice was ice-cold when he looked up at Lindemann. “Not an act to be proud of, Captain Lindemann—to take your miseries out on harmless little men who’d do you no harm.”
Lindemann raised his mug and drained the rum, not even looking at the doctor. “On whoever, my good Doctor—if he throws his line in my waters during the one free hour I’ve got to get drunk and forget those miseries.”
He pounded the mug on the bar, and Bennett hurried from the opposite side of the bar back over to him, his peg leg thumping on the wooden floor. As he poured out more rum, Suggs rose slowly to his feet, his face the color of a fish’s belly. He wiped the wet off his face and looked up at the big man in the slicker. “You’re an evil man, Cap’n,” he said in a shaking voice. “You’ve no heart in your body. You can’t love. You can’t give. You can’t share.”
Lindemann very deliberately emptied the mug, the rum coursing through him like some kind of medicinal lava. Then he very slowly turned to look down at Suggs. The men closest to them made nervous movements, as if to get between them. Lindemann had a murderous rage, well known and frequently experienced in the village. But the look on the captain’s face froze them.
He reached out and touched Suggs’s shirt, then flicked his fingers across the buttons, as if dusting. His voice was so soft as almost not to be heard. “You’ve just taken a share, Mr. Suggs; just a spoonful of the hate I’ve got in me for the place, the time, the company, the weather, and the night’s catch.” He reached into his pocket and took out a handful of coins, which he flung onto the bar; then he turned and surveyed the silent men around him. “And the rest of you half-frozen cod catchers—what would Mr. Suggs have you love?” He moved away from the bar, buttoning up his slicker as he walked. He stopped at the door, staring out of its window at the fog, then listening pensively to a distant foghorn. “The sea, maybe?” he asked. “Should we love the sea? It ties up our bowels with fear. It ages us, and it finally kills us. And still each morning we sail out for an embrace.” He turned to look at the men at the bar. “We are such damned fools that we don’t deserve any better.”
With this, Hendrick Lindemann opened the door and walked out onto the cobblestoned street, past the dirty little lofts and shops that huddled along the street front facing the sea. He went in and out of the little pools of gaslight that shone so weakly through the layers of fog, until he reached the wharf where his little ketch was berthed. He was halfway down its length when he noticed three men of his crew gathered at the far end, murmuring, whispering, and pointing toward the net at their feet.
When Lindemann emerged from the fog, it was Granger, his first mate, who rose to his feet and faced him. “Cap’n,” Granger began, “either we’re out of our minds—”
Lindemann curtly cut him off. “Likely. Or full up on some bad grog. Or maybe you can tell me why three full grown men kneel around a fish net and shiver.”
The smallest and oldest of the sailors, a gnarled little Pole named Bernacki, kicked at the net. “Lookee here, Cap’n. Lookee at what’s in that net. If you see what we see, maybe you’ll shiver.”
Lindemann picked up a ship’s lamp from off the wooden planking of the wharf and held it over the net, peering down through a maze of seaweed and dead fish until what he saw chopped off his breath. He straightened up and dropped the lantern. At the same moment, the light went out and there was nothing but darkness, mixed with the breathing of the frightened men and the sound of some flapping thing inside the net.
Granger thumbnailed a match and relit the lantern. His voice was a whisper. “Do you . . . do you see it Cap’n ?”
He started to bring the lantern back over to the net. Lindemann grabbed his arm and held tightly to it. “There’s no need of light,” he said through his teeth, “to look at an illusion.”
The third sailor, a young harpooner named Doyle, pulled the lantern from Granger’s hand and slammed it down on the plank next to the net. “Take a look at that illusion, Cap’n. Just take a look at it.”
Lindemann, with an almost desperate reluctance, let his eyes focus on what he knew he had already seen.
Through the mesh of the net there was a woman’s face—white, cold, the lips a shade of purple, but the face incredibly alive and also incredibly beautiful. The folds of the net covered the outline of her body from face to waist, but protruding out of the net on its other side was the lower half of the woman’s body—a long, fin-tailed protuberance that flapped weakly from side to side.
Lindemann closed his eyes briefly. “Kill it,” he said in a strained voice, “then throw it back into the sea.”
His first mate let out a gasp. “Cap’n—it’s part woman.”
Lindemann wrenched his eyes away from the net. “It’s all monster.”
Old Bernacki scratched at his seamed face. “Fifty years I’ve sailed, Cap’n, and I’ve never seen the likes of this.” He shook his head back and forth. “It would be sacrilege to harm this creature.”
“And you’re suggesting what?” Lindemann roared at him, trying to disguise his fear with a semblance of rage. “Take it home? Fondle it from the belly up and fry it from the waist down?” He pointed to the net. “That goddamned thing isn’t from Davy Jones—it’s from the devil.”
The men on the wharf turned toward the sound of voices and footsteps. Approaching the moorings were at least a dozen figures, some of them carrying lanterns, their voices full of growing excitement. The village was like a stagnant pool, desperate for some kind of tidal wave to break the killing monotony. Obviously some of Lindemann’s crew had hurried over to the inn with news of the catch. Onto the wharf they came, tramping feet on the wooden plankings, until they stopped at the periphery of the ship’s lamp and stared down at the net.