In Darkest Depths

Then it was gone. A flick of its tail and fish dived for the dark depths it called home.

Blue Water Woman shook herself to break the spell. She felt Nate tug on her ankle. He gestured toward the surface and she nodded. Together, they swam up and gulped air.

“Are you all right?” Nate asked.

“I am fine,” Blue Water Woman lied.

Nate swam to their canoe, climbed in, and offered her his hand. “Let me help you up.”

Blue Water Woman started toward him.

“Out for some exercise, are you?”

They turned. Coming toward them, on his knees in the bow of the dugout and paddling with his hands, was a white-haired devil of a different sort, wearing a grin a mile wide.

“Shakespeare!” Nate exploded. “We found you!”

“I would argue that I found you, Horatio, since I saw you first.”

Blue Water Woman squealed in delight and stroked to the dugout. “Carcajou!” she cried. “You are alive!” Pulling herself up, she threw herself into his open arms and clung to him as if to life itself.

“You are getting me wet, woman,” Shakespeare grumbled. “And I was just starting to dry out.”

“I have been in the water,” Blue Water Woman said huskily, her face pressed to his neck.

“In the middle of the lake?”

“I thought you were dead. I was avenging you.”

Shakespeare looked down at her. “Do you always do your avenging in the altogether?”

“You noticed.”

“Men always notice little things like naked women. All a woman has to do is take off her clothes, and she is a regular sensation.”

“I have missed you.” Blue Water Woman kissed him and closed her misting eyes.

“Not so fast, wench. Here I am gone for a while, and I come back to find you cavorting with my best friend.”

“Behave. He saved me from making a mistake.”

“He was a mite slow,” Shakespeare said.

“Not that,” Blue Water Woman responded in mild exasperation. “I was going to stab the water devil.”

Shakespeare gripped her shoulders and pushed her back. “You didn’t! God in heaven, tell me you didn’t.”

“I didn’t.”

Shakespeare exhaled in relief.

Nate was not following any of this. “Hold on. You were the one who kept saying the thing was a menace and had to be killed. I thought that was what all this was about?”

“Since when do you listen to me?” Shakespeare rejoined.

“I am serious. We have gone to all this bother. The steeple. The canoes. Lou nearly drowing. And now you are saying it was all for nothing? That you have changed your mind and don’t want the thing dead?”

“That is pretty much it, yes. Remember the Bard. He said that the quality of mercy is not strained; it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.”

Nate shook his head in bewilderment. “You are as fickle as the weather. Next you will be saying that it was a mistake for us to come out after it.”

“A mistake and then some,” Shakespeare concurred. “What merit were it in death to take this poor maid from the world?”

“Are we talking about a woman or the creature?

“Ah, Horatio!” Shakespeare beamed. “A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.”

“I can never tell when you are serious.”

“I am always serious,” Shakespeare said. “Except when I’m not.”

“You are a lunatic.”

“And you have not so much brain as ear wax.”

“Enough.” Blue Water Woman pecked her husband on the chin. “Stop teasing him, Carcajou. Why have you changed your mind about the water devil?”

“Fish,” Shakespeare said. “It is a fish. Not a water devil. Nor a beast. Not a monster or a demon or a creature. It is a plain and simple fish.”

“I have looked into its eyes,” Blue Water Woman said, and shuddered.

“Et tu?” Shakespeare quoted. “And what did you see in them? What did your womanly intuition tell you?”

Blue Water Woman hesitated. “I am not certain.”

“I am,” Shakespeare said. “Have I mentioned that it saved me? That the dugout had capsized and I could not right it? And the fish did it for me?”

Nate started to laugh but caught himself. “Wait. The fish has gone from menace to savior? I take my words back. You are not as fickle as the weather. You are more fickle than the weather.”

“The answer is there, Horatio, if you but have the eyes to see,” Shakespeare said.

“I don’t even know the question.”

Shakespeare swept an arm at the watery expanse in which their canoes were drifting. “My mistake was one anyone could make. After those incidents we had, I jumped to the conclusion the fish was out to harm us. To be honest, I didn’t think it was a fish. I figured it was a holdout from the dawn of time, and that when we cornered it, it would turn out to be something completely new. Or, I should say, completely old.”

“I never saw a fish like this one,” Nate said.

“It is unique. But it wasn’t always. It had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere was other fish.”

“You are taking the long way around the bush.”

“Straight tongue, then,” Shakespeare said. “The fish was not trying to harm us. It wanted to be friends.”

Nate had heard his mentor express some peculiar notions over the years, but this one beat them all, and he declared as much.

Shakespeare sighed. “Pay attention. I am the schoolmarm and you are the student.” He dipped his hand into the lake and held it out as the drops splattered the surface. “This lake is your home. Once—”

“Mine?” Nate interrupted. “I am a fish now?”

“If I had a tree limb I would beat you. Let me finish.” Shakespeare paused. “Now, as I was saying, this lake is your home and you share it with others of your kind. But one by one they age and die until you are the last one left. The other fish in the lake are not the same. You share the lake with them, but you are as different from them as an elk is from ants. Do you savvy so far?”

“As strange as it sounds, you almost make sense.”

“Good. So you are the last, and you go on living, year after year, winter after winter. But you have no one to call a companion. There is you and only you, and you are as lonesome as lonesome can be.”

“Oh, brother,” Nate said.

“Then one day new critters show up. Two-legged varmints who spend a lot of time near and in the water. You hear them. You smell them. Naturally, you want to find out more about them, so you swim close to them a few times, and because you do not realize how big and strong you are, you break their fishing line and knock one of them over when you push in too close to shore.”

Nate’s eyes widened. “You are not suggesting—”

Shakespeare did not let him finish. “I certainly am. The fish was never out to harm us. It was curious, is all. Curious and friendly, and its friendliness nearly got some of us killed.”

“It is a fish,” Nate said.

“Yes. We have established that fact. For a student you are an awful dunce.”

“You make it sound almost human. You don’t know it was only curious. You don’t know it was only being friendly.”

“It fetched you to me, didn’t it?”

“I must have missed that part,” Nate said.

“You were following it, weren’t you? And it led you right to me. I think it was trying to help.”

“I think I need a drink.” Nate looked at Blue Water Woman, who had been strangely quiet. “What do you