In the cold dawn light, they carry the child out of the big house and down to the pond. The water is grey with submerged ice, striated mud frozen hard to its banks, and the reeds are swollen within whitish sheaths. The child is sickly. It shrieks and shrieks as they lower its thin body into the water.
This they do every morning, all through the year, for as long as it takes to effect the cure. Their nerves grow hardened like the frosted ground underfoot. The screams used to rut their souls as the child’s clawing fingers rutted the mud, but no longer.
Below the water, something stirs as though from sleep.
Hundreds of years before—it remembers—this land was a place of communal gathering. The women of the village washed clothes in the fresh waters of an inflowing stream, now long since diverted. When their children grew sick, they kept them indoors, piled them with animal skins, and fed them weak ale to bring down their thirst. These people feared the water, as they ought. Water is the oldest killer.
It was the death of a child that brought change. Transformation they could stomach, if not accept—always there were those who wailed at the loss, usually women: when the hair and the skin began to grow rough, when the webbing joined finger to finger, toe to toe, and what was once child escaped out into the fens, to become—what? The elders would gather their people, ring them around the flame pit, and slake their loss with the only tool they had: the telling of tales. Always the change that comes. Ever the children go forth. It was a natural order, of a sort; a cycle they could observe, if not comprehend. Until the child died.
Its mother had fought the change. That was perceived to be the problem. With scrubs of dried bark, with the patience only a mother could summon, she worked away at the hair that sought to claim her child’s cheeks, its soft belly, its arms and hands. With tears coarsening her throat, she filed off the claws that erupted from nailbeds, cut slits in the skin that joined fingers and toes. The wails of the child broke from her hut and echoed out over the cookfire and into the overgrown dark of the fen beyond. She was deaf to them, grim to its pleas. She thought she was doing the right thing.
After the child died—a sudden, frightening death: its limbs contracting in a compulsive fit and red, rancid bile forcing a drowning rush from its lips and nose—they took the woman to the place they used, where the ground was a little higher and therefore dry enough to dig. There they buried her while their elder intoned a prayer of propitiation. She didn’t resist. Only when the earth scattered her face, striking her eyeballs, was she observed to flinch and to whimper, her lips as they met the soil whispering her dead child’s name.
The village emptied that winter. More children than ever before fell sick, altered, and crawled off on clawed, mottled limbs into the fen. The elders were sorrowful but helpless. Singly at first, and then in groups, families dispersed, taking their chances on the roads or seeking out relatives in the fishing communities to the east. Left to its own will, the fen fell back into wildness.
Centuries passed. The waters rose, consumed, fell again. Occasional eyes passed along the fen’s snaking waterways: trespassers, in pursuit of marshfowl, of eels, of reeds that could be twined into baskets and sold. Very seldom, a pair of these eyes would light on one of the fen children—in winter, at twilight, when you could not be sure quite what you had seen—and an impression would be left of wet, dark pelt emerging from quagmire, of fangs behind human lips, and of something that undid the nerves and ought not to have been seen. The boats poled quickly on, the trespassers hurrying for home, but over their shoulders they could sense, if not see, the vast of weight of something following them, taking the measure of them, marking their passage from this place.
A Dutchman came. In his native land, beyond the sea, he had achieved an impossibility: the transfiguration of water into soil. With this technology, he explained, there was no further need for half of England to languish in fenland obscurity. No, the water could be drained, and then—what riches! Fields, as far as the eye could see (for where once there was water, the land will lie forever flat)—rich, fertile fields, yielding crops, cattle, wealth. It was progress, he explained. It could not be prevented.
As the water receded—the fen’s lifeblood funnelled into culverts and ditches, artificial arteries that drained its ancient heart, and its rivers brutally straightened—the land sank. Was this punishment? God’s wrath, at the undoing of his creation; or the wrath of something older and stranger even than Him? Not at all, said the Dutchman. Without its water content, you see, the soil simply shrinks. The fen now lies below sea level. Quite to be expected, but it will take careful management, a constant policing of borders, to keep the water out of what was once its home. Earthworks and ramparts and hard human labour.
The menfolk applied themselves to the task. The fen became fields, and the fields became food and flax, and the rich became richer.
In certain poor and overlooked regions, far from the attentions of this new crop of landowners, pockets of fenland remained. Here, in all that was left of its once vast territory, it shrank like the soil, divided, and withdrew. And in the mud-sodden reedbeds and among the roots of twisted, damp-stunted trees, its children dwindled one by one from sight and from mind.
The land grab continued. Across the country, not only the drained hollow of the fens but the grassland that provided common grazing, the hills, the very land beneath folks’ dwellings, was declared to be property—had been, had always been, Property. Deeds were drawn up. Taxes were collected, and fences erected. In these enclosed spaces, cut off from both the past and from common sense, new rules forbade access. Land that had served a purpose throughout countless generations was sequestered for private pleasure. Trees were felled, habitats reduced to gardens, and into the resulting ecological void were brought game birds, farm animals, horses, and peacocks.
As time passed, the pockets of fenland became smaller and fewer.
The manicuring of the land encroached around them.
What had been fen became farmland, became garden, became pond.
Those who lived in the big house had thought many times of destroying the pond. Too low-lying, they complained, too dank. It had been intended to look decorative, but in the summer months its weed-choked, inscrutable depths were a breeding ground for winged pests, and in the winter its frozen surface lurked like a lidless eye at the bottom of the garden, a swamp of ugliness and unease, drawing and eating the frail light. But successive generations of gardeners had advised against its removal. The slope of the lawn, they argued, would cause water to collect there, regardless of whether the pond were filled in. Better an intentional feature than an unkempt swamp.
And so it remained. In the shrunken waters of the pond, cut off and hobbled, it persisted, this remnant of an ancient fear. Over hundreds of years, the family failed to destroy its hiding place, its final prison. For miles around they had thought to conquer the land, trying to take and tame what was never theirs. But the pond remained. From its watery hole, it watched, and it preyed.
The child was not born sick. It sickened gradually, over a period of years, during which time its skin became rough, its hair thick and dark, and its nails sharp and fast-growing. Its nursemaid, whose name was Flora, remembered it as a chubby, soft-faced baby, prone to tantrums after feeding, reluctant to forgo the fascinations of the world for a nap. She had rocked it in the depths of the wintral nights, in the dead hours of long summer afternoons, humming it songs that she knew from her own childhood, songs that these rich folks were sure to beat out of it when it was older, but no matter. She knew every crease of its baby skin, every fold of its chubby legs.
When the child sickened, they removed it from Flora’s supervision. She was kept occupied with the family’s two younger daughters, but every morning she heard the wails and screams from the garden, and her mind turned again and again to the strange fate of her former charge. Would the child die, she had asked once, diffidently, frightened to raise her gaze from the hem of her own skirt, and the mistress of the house had brushed aside her question with frozen eyes. The child was not to be discussed. The child was no longer her concern.
Gradually, Flora came to realise that the child’s illness had not come as a surprise to the family in the big house. An uncle, she gathered from snippets of servants’ gossip, had been similarly afflicted. And, some said, a great-uncle, before that. And before that, back and back, went the legend, to the days when the big house was built.
Once in a generation, a child of the family would sicken.
Flora made her way to the sickroom. It was late at night; she had been up late settling the youngest daughter, who was recovering from a bout of fever, and the big house was cold and silent as a tomb. Frightened at her own disobedience, Flora crept to the room where the child was kept. She listened at its door. They employed a nurse, she knew, a forbidding, grim-faced woman of perhaps sixty, who was rumoured to have nursed the afflicted uncle many years before. Flora twisted the handle, inched open the door. The nurse was asleep, snoring wetly with her eyes half-closed.
From the child’s bed, Flora could hear faint, rasping breath. She approached on numb feet. The light of her candle formed twin pools of gold in the child’s eyes. It drew in its breath, then opened wide its mouth. Flora saw fangs, long and curved, yellow like the claws that gripped the bedspread. Across the child’s head, where once she had stroked and smoothed soft, downy hair, the pelt of some wild animal spread and thickened, smothering pointed ears.
Before Flora could move or even breathe, the child screamed.
She clutched hold of her candle. The flame wobbled, the liquid gold of the child’s eyes flashing as it raised its terrible head. Flora backed away. She reached with one hand for the doorknob, and that rending scream went on and on—
The nurse shifted with a creak of weighted buttocks in her armchair, and emitted a groan. Without opening her eyes, she groped for the stout stick that stood propped against her chair, and swung it with practised aim onto the child’s legs. The scream broke off. Grizzling, yowling deep in its throat like an angered cat, the child sank back amongst its bedding. Its yellow eyes remained fixed on Flora.
Her breath flew fast and silent from her throat. She waited for the nurse to open her eyes and reprimand her. She would be sent back to bed in disgrace, and in the morning the master would be notified, and would dismiss her. Banished home, without character, without wages, to the mute dismay of her aging mother, and all to satisfy a moment’s dreadful curiosity.
But the nurse’s eyes remained closed. As Flora stood frozen in the doorway, the older woman settled back into her chair, the stick still held loosely in one hand, and resumed her wobbling snore.
The child blinked. It growled very softly, and two clawed hands emerged to grip the edge of the blanket. Its fingers were webbed and darkly furred. The golden eyes blinked again, and again. Retrieving her senses, Flora backed from the room and fled.
Sleep wouldn’t come to her. For the rest of the night, she lay half-conscious, seeing in snatches of dream or hallucination the clawed hands, the furred head and golden eyes of the doomed child. For she was convinced that it was doomed. No amount of tending, no water cure, could possibly undo the damage that nature (or perhaps something that was not of nature?) had done.
When dawn broke, Flora pulled her exhausted limbs from bed and crouched by the small attic window of her room. She could just see, if she angled her head to peer round the side of a chimney stack, the pond at the bottom of the garden. This morning, as every morning, the small party made its way down the slope, with the child wrapped in blankets carried between them. The master, the mistress, and the nursemaid.
They reached the pond, and the child was stripped unceremoniously from its coverings. It wore a thin white nightshirt over its fur. It began to bawl, a high, wailing cry that reached Flora’s ears even at such distance. The master and the nursemaid gripped its arms while the mistress held its blankets, and the child was lifted and placed into the water. The wailing cry became a bone-chilling shriek. Flora shuddered, clutching her upper arms. It went on and on, the water cure, the child dunked again and again, the shriek shattering and reforming like the ice on the pond’s surface.
When they finally hauled it out, the child sank between their hands as though half dead. The mistress, her face an immobile shell, flung the blankets over it, and it was carried back up the slope and into the house. Halfway up the slope, its head turned, the thickly haired neck straining to see the water, as though in its terror unwilling to lose from sight the place of its torment. Then the blanket was pulled impatiently up, the child’s head covered, and the miserable little party reached the foot of the front steps and returned indoors.
The ghost of the shriek continued to ring in Flora’s ears.
For a while, she remained at the window. The housemaids were already up; she could hear them clattering with their brushes and coal baskets up and down the staircase outside her room. Flora knew she ought to dress and go downstairs to check on the youngest daughter, but she continued to watch the pond and thought she saw, very faintly at this remove, a shadow coiling and uncoiling below the water, a dark tendril seeming to approach the surface again and again, as though searching for something. For what it had lost.
The rest of the day passed in a haze of busyness. The youngest daughter had awoken fully recovered and brimming with energy after her brief confinement to bed. Between them, she and her sister kept Flora over-occupied with games and demands and wild, aristocratic tantrums, so that it was a relief when she put them to bed for their afternoon nap. Leaving a junior housemaid to keep watch in the nursery, Flora hurried down the back stairs and slipped out of the tradesmen’s entrance into the darkening gardens.
The slope lay long and bare in the last of the winter light. The grass was damp with frost, and Flora’s shoes and stockings were sodden before she was halfway down. She moved quickly, hoping nobody was watching her from the windows. There was no specific rule, as far as she knew, against her taking a breath of air in the garden, but it was not the done thing, and she had brought a small basket with her as cover, though what she might be intending to pick and put into it, at this time of year, she had no idea.
Ducking under the low trees at the foot of the slope, she made her way round to the far side of the pond.
The mud on the bank had frozen into strange ridges. Rotten twigs and the stems of dead vegetation protruded at the water’s edge, where a bed of dense, stunted-looking reeds extended into and below the swollen surface. Flora picked her way as close to the water as she dared. The frozen ground felt slushy and slow beneath her, as though it slept and dreamed of swallowing.
She felt rather than saw the presence. That was how she thought of it later, as a presence, rather than a thing or a creature or anything as sordid and corporeal as a body. It was a presence as old as the earth, or as old as the water, for she did not know which had come first. It seemed to her logical, even likely, that the world had begun as a huge lake, so huge it extended all across the globe, and that the fens and the land had risen up through it, over time, and could easily disappear once again beneath its endless wash. The land, she understood, did not belong to people, not even the people who owned the big house, and who thought they owned the pond. Rather, the big house and all its land, somehow, in some ancient way, belonged to the pond.
The presence moved below the water. She imagined infinite tendrils, of an infinite age, childless and alone, and then she realised—not childless. That was what it was. She saw again in her mind’s eye the head of the child turning back towards the pond, towards the water that had caused it so much pain, and she knew now she had misunderstood the nature of that pain. The water was not intended to cure, but to sustain. One breath a day, so that the captive fish might survive the rest of its hours on land. It was not the ice that caused the child to shriek, but the loss of it.
She became lost in the swirl of that ice-slushed water. The darkness below its surface, the depth, the idea that it might extend down, down, to some unimaginable below-world, where ancient and unknowable creatures swam in perpetual black…
Flora pushed herself to her feet, finding with some surprise that she was crouched kneeling on the bank, her hands and head extending towards the water as though drawn downwards. She shook her head. Tendrils moved behind her eyes. The bank, the ground, the trees, all of it seemed ghostly and insubstantial. Hardly feeling the squish of her wet shoes through the grass, she ran back up the slope towards the big house.
The child did not struggle. As though it recognised her, was pleased to see her, even, it rose on its matted elbows as she pushed wide its door that night. The nurse was asleep, one ham-like fist closed around her stout stick. Flora helped the child with its blankets. Its hands were clumsy, elongated and webbed, designed for an aquatic world. She had not brought a candle this time, but still there was a gold glint deep in the child’s eyes, faint and feral, a light remembered.
Together, they crept through the silent house. The child seemed frightened, and Flora held its clawed hand. It breathed in noiseless gulps, the gills at its neck rising and falling. She took it down the main stairs; even at this time of night, there was the danger of running into someone on the servants’ stairs. They left through the heavy oak doors and hurried down the stone steps.
The child’s head rose. In the cold, moonlit air, it sniffed, gills held wide, mouth open as it tasted the nearness of water. Still clutching Flora’s hand, it began to run down the slope. It seemed to grow as it ran, or to strengthen, no more the blanket-bundled, insubstantial wraith carried to its cure that was not a cure. Flora slipped and stumbled on the wet grass. The darkness pressed on her eyes. Only the pond was visible, its surface a silver slick of moonlight, strands of ice weaving and strengthening across the water like loving hands.
When they reached the pond, Flora cried out. She feared that the child would not let go, that the ice-like grip would tighten, carrying her below the water and down to some unthinkable cold, dark death. But the child paused, seeming to remember or notice her. Balanced on the bank, it turned, and gently disentangled its claws from her fingers. It blew air through its fangs, though what it meant by this she could not understand.
There was movement in the heart of the pond. Great arms, or tentacles, or something less corporeal, merely a pulsing of the elements. The child gave her a last look and turned away. It slipped into the water swiftly, elegantly, its body moulding to the water’s weight as though made for it, which, she supposed, it was. And the thing at the heart of the pond bubbled upwards and upwards, a riotous boiling of silver-smooth limbs, rejoicing.
Flora stumbled. She landed hard on the frozen bank, jolting her wrist, and her eyes seemed to slip in their sockets. When she could see again, the water of the pond was as still and silent as a sheet of glass.
They found her there the next morning. Half-dead with cold, unable to remember how she had got there, she was carried back to the big house wrapped in a blanket and tucked into her bed. The other servants took turns nursing her, and after a brief fever she recovered well. Her memory, on the other hand, did not return, and her midnight venture to the pond was put down to sleepwalking.
In the meantime, it had of course been discovered that the sickly child was gone. Everyone was told that it had died, and a funeral was held, the black mourning clothes that covered the family masking their guilt-ridden relief. The child’s nurse had, of course, been dismissed. After a few months, as soon as some polite excuse could be found, so was Flora.
She returned home with three months’ wages and a good character, signed by the mistress herself, who had bade her goodbye with doubt clouding her eyes. Flora found work at a nearby house, newly built, the family some kind of new money up from London. Travelling there from her mother’s cottage, Flora passed endless fields, flat, unbroken fields, vulgar with the dregs of winter. She looked out from the rattling cart and imagined only water.
Wherever she went, throughout the rest of her life, people would ask her about the family in the big house—ask her in hushed tones, in low, thrilled voices, as though in awareness of some unspoken, or unspeakable, doom, some curse that lay forever upon that place. Long after the house had been sold, and resold, and commandeered as a barracks during the war, and finally abandoned and left to fall into ruin, rumours of its haunting persisted. And the pond remained.
People remembered the fens. The vast wilderness was mourned, memorialized in song and story, in the names of places and roads, and even the children, though long gone, were not completely forgotten. The fear of the water lived on.
It lives on still.
