I knew there was nothing to be done as soon as I saw her, but waded in anyway. It wasn’t deep. I pulled her out, tried to give her the kiss of life with no success, then covered her with my jacket and ran for the nearest phone.
“Bad business,” Geoff said later. I was in the back of an ambulance with a red blanket round me, holding a mug of hot sweet tea—I’d been close to hypothermia when the police arrived. A doctor knelt beside the body; blue lights played across the ground and the faces of the crowd that had gathered.
“The hell was she doing up here?” I said, teeth chattering, and spat again. I couldn’t get the taste of her mouth—stagnant water, rotten weeds—out of mine.
“God knows,” he said. “You know kids, Bill. What were we like, that age? She went off wandering, went too close, fell in. Nasty, but that’s how it happens.”
That’s how it happens. Not much of an epitaph for a child. But the truth, or so it seemed then. And that was where it should have ended, but it didn’t.
I was laid up for a week after that; got a cold that turned into a chest infection. Smoking ten B&H a day probably didn’t help. I went to bed and didn’t get up. My dad said I should be up and looking for work, but Mam shushed him. Looking back, I expect it was more than just physical: today they’d talk about PTSD or depression, but back then, you just put your head down and carried on.
I suppose that’s why I went back to the tarn. There were flowers there, most of them withered and dead, and the same cold gray water. I was wrapped up warm, but shivering; when I touched my face it was hot. I should probably still have been in bed.
I started back the way I’d come, but looked back once. It’s still the most desolate thing I’ve seen. Bitter sky and ragged grass, the dull crag of the mill, the chill dead water of the tarn. But then I saw something the other side of the water, across from where I’d found Maisie.
Something glistened on the grass and earth by the bank. Plastic? I touched it, then snatched my fingers away to rub them clean; it was still sticky. A foot-wide trail of clear mucus, hardening like resin. I sniffed my hand: rotten weeds, dead fish. I thought of a slug’s track, or the slime that covered a frog.
A week later, another child drowned in a fishing pond: Stephen Philipson, a ten-year-old from Irlam way—again, on an afternoon of heavy rain. Mam tried to hide the newspaper, but I saw.
I went out, down the pub. It was a weeknight, quiet, but I saw Geoff sitting by the fire. I bought two Scotches and took them over.
“Cheers, our kid,” he said. “How you doing?”
I shrugged.
“You heard, then?”
“What about?”
“The other kiddy.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“Nasty business. ’Specially after the one you found.”
“Another accident?”
Geoff looked round. “Keep this to yourself, all right?”
“Okay.”
“Pathologist was eighty, ninety percent sure what happened to the Donovan girl was an accident. But this new one—it’s exactly the same there, too.”
“What is?”
“He wasn’t sure. Said they looked a bit like finger marks, but weird sort of shape—probably caused by something else, but no idea what.”
I saw what he was getting at. “On both of them? You mean someone— ”
“No, I do not, and neither does anyone else. Officially. Got it?”
“Right.”
“But unofficially—keep an eye out, our kid.”
“Okay.” I hesitated, but had to ask. “What’s so weird about the marks, anyway?”
Now he hesitated. “You didn’t get this from me. They were a bit like fingers, pathologist said—bloody long fingers. But—well, if some sick bastard had done it, you’d have thought they’d have grabbed the kids from behind. Pushed them in, held them under.”
I thought again of Maisie Donovan, facedown in the tarn.
“But the pathologist said it was like they’d been grabbed from the front. As if someone in the water had pulled them in.”
Someone in the water, or under it.
I kept an eye out, as he’d asked: watched the playgrounds for anyone staring at the kids. I made a point of looking at people’s hands, to see how long their fingers were. My cough came back, even worse. I didn’t sleep well.
Then a third child drowned: another boy, this one eight years old. They found him in a park duck pond—again, in the rain. Geoff didn’t want to tell me, but I pestered him until he did—yes, he’d had the same marks as the other two.
Maisie kept coming back at odd moments—the memory of her, I mean, as I’d found her. I had some idea that if she had been murdered, catching the swine might make it stop.
As at the tarn, a heap of dead flowers lay where it had happened. I paced around the duck pond and stopped at the far end: it was thick with rushes, and at the bottom of a grass slope. At the top of the slope was a set of iron railings, bent wide enough to let something more or less man-sized slip through.
I saw something else, too: a wide strip of grass, leading down from the railings to the rushes, had been flattened, and was matted with some clear substance. I touched it and a piece broke off: it was like a very thin resin, and it smelt. Like dead, rotten fish.
I went on up to the fishing pond after that. It was a big, square-shaped pool with a busy main road along one side, a quiet side road by another, and blocks of council housing by the other two. I checked the banks and verges, but couldn’t find anything, and then it started raining again.
I was tired; I walked up the path to the side road, which was where I saw a patch of something dry and shiny on the pavement. Just over the road, there was a big patch of waste ground, where an old factory had been pulled down about nine or ten years before.
I went over, in among the damp trees, walked lumpy, overgrown ground till I found a small pool of water. There was dried slime on the grass on either side: a trail led away from the pond, through high grass and nettles. Farther off was the motorway, and even farther up was the old mill.
By the time I got home, I was practically on fire and my lungs felt scorched when I breathed. I went straight to bed and lay sweating, the room spinning around me. And that was when I remembered a story of my nan’s.
Nan knew lots of creepy old stories about Salford: she’d loved telling them to us, and we’d loved hearing them. But the one I remembered was Jinny Greenteeth.
Jinny Greenteeth, Nan had said, lived in the water—the River Irwell, to be exact, which runs right through Salford. She had long green hair like waterweed, and lay waiting for children to come too near the bank. When they did, she grabbed them, and pulled them in to drown.
But that was just a story—and anyway, Jinny Greenteeth had lived in the Irwell, not in an old mill tarn.
Except that—well, nothing lived in the Irwell in those days. They’ve cleaned it up now, but we used to say it looked like a pint of Guinness. So what would you do? You’d go looking for a new home. Swim upstream, or, if you could, climb out of the water and find somewhere else.
Like maybe a pond, or a tarn. And, maybe, you’d burrow into the mud at the bottom and hibernate. Then wake up and…
Wake up and what?
Feed. On whatever it was you fed on.
If I hadn’t been so feverish, I’d have laughed it right off. But by the time I fell asleep, it seemed to make a lot of sense.
Geoff came around the next day, after Dad had gone to work. I was better than before, but still coughing like hell.
“There’s been another,” he said.
“Where?”
“Never mind that now. The hell did you think you were doing, hanging round crime scenes like some bloody ghoul? You were seen.”
“You were the one who told me— ”
“To keep an eye out, not play at whatever you’re playing at. Hanging around playgrounds, for Christ’s sake? They’ll think you’re a bloody kiddy-fiddler.”
“I’m
not!”
“I know that. Well, leave off with it. Stay home, stay in bed, and get a bloody job while somebody’ll still employ you.”
I wanted to ask where the latest death had happened, but knew he wouldn’t tell me. It didn’t matter. I’d already worked out that the two ponds were the nearest bodies of water of any size to the tarn—the one I’d seen on the waste ground had been only two or three feet wide. They’d be easy to reach by something crawling through the grass on its belly.
Rain spotted against the window.
After Geoff had gone, and Mam had gone out shopping, I got dressed, then hunted in the kitchen till I found a near-empty bottle of Ben Shaw’s Lemonade. I emptied and rinsed it, pulled on Dad’s heavy raincoat, and slipped out.
I reached the field beside the old mill about an hour later. The sky was darkening: it wouldn’t be long.
I hid in some bushes, waiting for it to come, or go.
The wind blew; the sky above blackened. Rain spotted, then quickened: first a drizzle, then heavier, till it came down in rods.
I put my hand in my coat pocket, wondering what the right moment would be, and how I’d know it, watching the tarn.
Thunder rumbled; the old mill stood black against the sky.
And then I heard it; a croaking sound that rose and fell in pitch. It became almost tuneful after you’d listened for a while, and the more you listened, the more you heard.
I was almost at the edge of the tarn before I realised what I was doing. Had it known I was there and decided to deal with the threat? Or, perhaps it had decided to lure another victim straight to its nest, and I’d simply been the closest? I don’t know what the range of its hypnotic call was, how far away Maisie Donovan or the rest were when they’d heard it. Perhaps some heard it more clearly than others. And children would be the most susceptible: fewer defences, less sense of danger to temper their curiosity.
I could see something in the water now: a low hump, beachball sized, covered in what looked like wet green waterweed. It had two fat pale spots, that blinked as I came closer. I understood what was happening, but I kept walking.
My hand was still in my pocket, though, and as I reached the bank of the tarn I pulled the bottle out. The thing in the water shifted, gathering itself; its ridged, saw-toothed back broke the surface.
I tried to twist the screw-top lid. It was stiff and wouldn’t move, but at last I felt it turn, as two thin, bony arms, ending in webbed, clawed, impossibly long-fingered hands, reached out from the surface of the tarn.
The rest is…fitful. I remember a long eelish tail coiling round my legs, and sometimes, in nightmares, a blurred face: something between a frog and a deep-sea fish, but at the same time almost human.
Someone saw me heading towards the mill and called Geoff. He came down planning to tear me off a strip; instead he found me in the tarn, half dead.
I was in hospital for a month after that, and nearly died twice. Pneumonia, together with the poison that had saved me: a solution of paraquat from my dad’s allotment, poured into that old Ben Shaw’s bottle.
There were no more drownings, anyway.
I still live in Salford, and I’ve a family of my own. The Irwell doesn’t look like a pint of Guinness anymore: they say it’s clean now. But I wouldn’t know. I never go down there, and I don’t let my kids go near it either.
See, they never found anything in the tarn. Just a long, slimy trail, leading away. I want to believe it crawled away to die, but the past doesn’t die. It only waits.
THE BALLAD OF BALLARD AND SANDRINE
by Peter Straub
1997
“So, do we get lunch again today?” Ballard asked. They had reached the steaming, humid end of November.
“We got fucking lunch yesterday,” replied the naked woman splayed on the long table: knees bent, one hip elevated, one boneless-looking arm draped along the curves of her body, which despite its hidden scars appeared to be at least a decade younger than her face. “Why should today be different?”
After an outwardly privileged childhood polluted by parental misconduct, a superior education, and two failed marriages, Sandrine Loy had evolved into a rebellious, still-exploratory woman of forty-three. At present, her voice had a well-honed edge, as if she were explaining something to a person of questionable intelligence.
Two days before joining Sandrine on this river journey, Ballard had celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday at a dinner in Hong Kong, one of the cities where he conducted his odd business. Sandrine had not been invited to the dinner and would not have attended if she had. The formal, ceremonious side of Ballard’s life, which he found so satisfying, interested her not at all.
Without in any way adjusting the facts of the extraordinary body she had put on display, Sandrine lowered her eyes from the ceiling and examined him with a glance brimming with false curiosity and false innocence. The glance also contained a flicker of genuine irritation.
Abruptly and with vivid recall, Ballard found himself remembering the late afternoon in 1969 when, nine floors above Park Avenue, upon a carpet of almost unutterable richness in a room hung with paintings by Winslow Homer and Albert Pinkham Ryder, he had stood with a rich scapegrace and client named Lauritzen Loy, his host, to greet Loy’s daughter on her return from another grueling day at Dalton School, then observed the sidelong, graceful, slightly miffed entrance of a fifteen-year-old girl in pigtails and a Jackson Browne sweatshirt two sizes too large, met her gray-green eyes, and felt the very shape of his universe alter in some drastic way, either expanding a thousand times or contracting to a pinpoint, he could not tell. The second their eyes met, the girl blushed, violently.
She hadn’t liked that, not at all.
“I didn’t say it was going to be different, and I don’t think it will.” He turned to look at her, making sure to meet her gaze before letting his eye travel down her neck, over her breasts, the bowl of her belly, the slope of her pubis, the length of her legs. “Are you in a more than ordinarily bad mood?”
“You’re snapping at me.”
Ballard sighed. “You gave me that look. You said, ‘Why should today be different?’”
“Have it your way, old man. But as a victory, it’s fucking pathetic. It’s hollow.”
She rolled onto her back and gave her body a firm little shake that settled it more securely onto the steel surface of the table. The metal, only slightly cooler than her skin, felt good against it. In this climate, nothing not on ice or in a freezer, not even a corpse, could ever truly get cold.
“Most victories are hollow, believe me.”
Ballard wandered over to the brass-bound porthole on the deck side of their elaborate, many-roomed suite. Whatever he saw caused him momentarily to stiffen and take an involuntary step backward.
“What’s the view like?”
“The so-called view consists of the filthy Amazon and a boring, muddy bank. Sometimes the bank is so far away it’s out of sight.”
He did not add that a Ballard approximately twenty years younger, the Ballard of, say, 1976, dressed in a handsome dark suit and brilliantly white shirt, was leaning against the deck rail, unaware of being under the eye of his twenty-years-older self. Young Ballard, older Ballard observed, did an excellent job of concealing his dire internal condition beneath a mask of deep, already well-weathered urbanity: the same performance, enacted day after day before an audience unaware of being an audience and never permitted backstage.
Unlike Sandrine, Ballard had never married.
“Poor Ballard, stuck on the Endless Night with a horrible view and only his aging, moody girlfriend for company.”
Smiling, he returned to the long steel table, ran his mutilated right hand over the curve of her belly, and cupped her navel. “This is exactly what I asked for. You’re wonderful.”
“But isn’t it funny to think—everything could have been completely different.”
Ballard slid the remaining fingers of his hand down to palpate, lightly, the spri
ngy black shrub-like curls of her pubic bush.
“Everything is completely different right now.”
“So take off your clothes and fuck me,” Sandrine said. “I can get you hard again in a minute. In thirty seconds.”
“I’m sure you could. But maybe you should put some clothes on, so we could go in to lunch.”
“You prefer to have sex in our bed.”
“I do, yes. I don’t understand why you wanted to get naked and lie down on this thing, anyhow. Now, I mean.”
“It isn’t cold, if that’s what you’re afraid of.” She wriggled her torso and did a snow angel movement with her legs.
“Maybe this time we could catch the waiters.”
“Because we’d be early?”
Ballard nodded. “Indulge me. Put on that sleeveless white French thing.”
“Aye, aye, mon capitain.” She sat up and scooted down the length of the table, pushing herself along on the raised vertical edges. These were of dark green marble, about an inch thick and four inches high. On both sides, round metal drains abutted the inner side of the marble. At the end of the table, Sandrine swung her legs down and straightened her arms, like a girl sitting on the end of a diving board. “I know why, too.”
“Why I want you to wear that white thing? I love the way it looks on you.”
“Why you don’t want to have sex on this table.”
“It’s too narrow.”
“You’re thinking about what this table is for. Right? And you don’t want to combine sex with that. Only I think that’s exactly why we should have sex here.”
“Everything we do, remember, is done by mutual consent. Our Golden Rule.”
“Golden Spoilsport,” she said. “Golden Shower of Shit.”
“See? Everything’s different already.”
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