The first mistake was going alone.
Arthur Pike had always fished solo, and he liked it that way. The world was loud—shouting bosses, bleating newsfeeds, high-pitched commercials screaming promises they never meant to keep. But out on the water?
Only the wind talked.
He launched his little skiff just before dawn, pale mist dancing on the surface of Lake Graft. Locals avoided this part, even the grizzled bass men who drank motor oil and smelled like bait buckets.
"You don't fish Graft's Hollow," they'd say. "It remembers."
But Arthur had caught nothing for weeks.
Desperation stinks stronger than fear.
---
The bite came just after noon.
At first, Arthur thought it was a snag—a sunken branch, maybe a rock. But then it pulled.
Hard.
So hard the reel whined in protest, the rod bent in an unnatural arc, its tip kissing the lake.
Arthur grinned. Big one. Real big.
He leaned back, legs braced on the hull. Whatever it was fought like hell—diving, spiraling, thrashing deep.
It wasn't a fish's fight.
It was measured. Almost... strategic.
Then it stopped.
Just floated, dead weight.
He hauled it closer, bracing for the first glimpse of scales.
But what surfaced wasn't a fish.
Not exactly.
---
It was shaped like a fish, sure—roughly. Torpedo body, thick tail, large dorsal ridge.
But its skin was smooth. Not scaly. Not slimy.
Pale gray and slightly translucent, like overcooked jelly.
Its eyes—if you could call them that—were not on the sides but set deep into its chest, two black slits filled with curling smoke that moved without wind.
No mouth. No gills.
Just a slit on its underside, stitched shut by something like coral, or maybe bone.
Arthur stared.
And the fish stared back.
Then, in a voice he didn't hear but felt inside his jaw:
> "Do you want to know what you pulled up?"
He dropped the rod.
It fell into the water and sank without a splash.
---
Back home, he tried to forget.
But when he closed his eyes, they opened instead.
Not his own.
Its.
Black, rolling slits of smoke.
They saw into him. Not like a predator—but like a cartographer, mapping the lines of his skull, the grooves of his regrets, the spaces between memories where secrets grew like mold.
He dreamt of drowning.
Not in water.
In names. Endless, ancient names that weren't meant to be said. Some didn't even have vowels. Some didn't have concepts.
He woke with bleeding gums.
And scales on his palms.
---
He returned to the lake two days later.
Not to fish.
To check.
The water was darker now. Oil-slicked. The air above it warped like heat shimmer, though the wind was icy.
Something had begun to die in that lake.
And something else had begun to wake.
Birds wouldn't fly over it.
The insects were silent.
And in the shallows, he found a hook—his hook—embedded in the gnarled wood of a tree stump.
But the stump blinked when he touched it.
And whispered:
> "You pulled up the wrong god."
---
Arthur began to see them around town.
People with wide, pale eyes. Fingers too long. Breathing just a little out of sync.
He'd known some of them his whole life.
But now they blinked too slowly.
Smiled too tightly.
And they whispered when they passed, always just beyond hearing:
> "You heard the call."
> "You felt the weight."
> "You pulled it out, Arthur."
> "Now it will pull you in."
He stopped leaving the house.
Didn't help.
His reflection stopped matching him.
---
He threw up a hook.
Not a memory. Not a hallucination.
An actual, rusted fish hook. Barbed and curved.
It had been inside him.
His stomach burned, and he could hear bubbles gurgling in his gut, like something lived there, coiled and wet, humming in a language he didn't know but suddenly understood.
He vomited again.
This time it wasn't bile.
It was lakewater.
---
He went back one last time.
Midnight. Moon like a blind eye.
The lake breathed fog, thick and warm. Shapes moved under the surface, some thin and fast, some wide enough to shift the entire horizon.
He waded into the water, clothes clinging.
The voice returned.
Inside his ribs, vibrating his bones.
> "You brought us light."
> "We bring you sight."
His eyes burned.
Then, finally, he saw.
---
There was no bottom.
Only layers of memory folded into flesh, old gods asleep in bubbles of perception, their dreams spilling upward into the minds of fishermen and madmen.
He saw his ancestors fishing in the same spot.
He saw them pulling the same thing.
He saw them changed, growing gills, losing language, worshipping the weight in the water.
This wasn't a first catch.
It was a cycle.
And it was his turn.
---
He tried to write it down.
To warn others.
But the letters slid off the page. Ink bled upward.
He could only draw the symbol: a fish with no mouth, a hook through its chest, and eyes like smoke.
He left the sketch in a tackle box on the shore.
Someone will find it.
Someone will go fishing.
Someone will pull.
And the cycle will begin again.