Donal Ryan short story: ‘He turned away from the beast, but the smell of death remained’

I’m up on 80 now by all accounts, so it must be 20-odd years since I did a bit of building work for a man in Nenagh called Dessie Treacy. He was some man to tell a story. I often used to tip into town on a Saturday afternoon and before I went near the pub or bookies I’d call in to Dessie’s workshop where he had plant for hire and I’d sit in behind the counter with him and his young sons and he’d tell story after story. Some men will corner you and try their damnedest to tell you every single thing that ever happened to them in their life and you’d sooner cut off your own ears with a rusty blade than listen to them, but men like Dessie are like a kind of a channel, a conduit for all the wit and fascination beneath the firmament, and listening to them is like being weightless, painless, invisible almost; you needn’t do a thing but sit still and be transported.

Dessie told me one Saturday morning about something that happened to him one time when he was out on Lough Derg fishing for pike. He was having a good day, drawing them from the water nearly at will. Dessie had a way of reading the mood of the water, of judging the flow and ripple of it, the spread and density of the clouds of insects along the foreshore, the smell of the lifting outshore breeze, the skim of mist along the surface of the water in the rising day, that allowed him to position himself in a spot where he’d be able to whisper the fish into his boat with hardly a need for a rod. He could sense through the wood of the floor of his boat the motion of the shoals, feel on his hands and face the dipping and the rising of his prey.

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Anyway, on this particular day, Dessie had a boat nearly capsizing with pike, long, razor-toothed devils of things, fish that could bite a man’s arm off. A pike will eat anything, and therefore is not considered good eating, but Dessie had the knack of filleting and salting and buttering them into wondrousness, and he had an empty chest freezer he intended to stock for the winter from the bounty of the lake. Just as he was thinking of heading ashore his line tautened and he drew and reeled but it wouldn’t come, only strained his rod nearly to breaking, and pulled him along against his locked oars, and he knew he had a big one, a king, an apex hunter trapped by another, and he was in a battle, suddenly, so he planted his feet wide and braced his shoulders for the struggle. A shadow fell across his boat then, and he wouldn’t even have looked up if it wasn’t for the smell that rose with the falling light, an alien odour yet strangely familiar, of ferment and mineral and the foul sweetness of decay, and he set his rod and turned around, and filling the sky behind him was a long-necked, wide-snouted thing, rising up and up from the dark water, green-black and scaled and yellow-eyed, and in the centre of the yellow were two black slits, and the apparition opened its great jaw and Dessie was looking into the deepest depths of his own nightmares, into the fanged and fork-tongued maw of death.

He knew in that moment that the monster was warning him that he’d taken too much from the water. That the creature straining at his line was to be released. He turned away from the beast and back to his line and he took his knife and cut it, and the sun shone again on his skin, and the warmth of the day returned, but the smell of death remained, and when a pike maybe five feet in length broke the water an oar’s length from his side he screamed so loud he was hoarse for days. The pike broke again, nearer him, and lifted itself up from the water so that it was leaning into the timber of his stern, almost flat on to his quarterknee, and Dessie could see that his line was trailing from the pike’s great mouth, and inside it was the lure he’d fashioned from a copper spoon to the shape of a baby trout, and the hook attached to it was fast inside its flesh. It rolled its eyes balefully at him, and Dessie without thinking leaned across and reached into the pike’s open mouth. He dislodged his hook and his copper lure, and the sun flashed white in the pike’s dark eye before he flopped back into the bottomless water of the centre of the lake.

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I never met that monster myself but then again I was never much of a fisherman. I dreamed of it, though, and I watched always when I rowed out from the headlands into the open water for its shadow, and tested the breeze for its smell, and once or twice or maybe a handful of times I sensed its presence near me, watching, and I knew it possessed the sum of all knowledge of me and of all men, of the doings and undoing of the world.

Donal Ryan is the author of The Spinning Heart, From a Low and Quiet Sea, and The Queen of Dirt Island, among other books, and a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Limerick. This story is from Dreams: Fifty Years of Creativity, Culture and Community at the University of Limerick, edited by Joseph O’Connor with Eoin Devereux and Sarah Moore, and published by Irish Academic Press