Nelly Longarms
by Keith Davies
part 1
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Make haste and do your errand! Go not nigh the river bank, For there the mermaids lie. —Old Suffolk proverb. |
“Nine! Nine carbonized chips looking like tiny, mummified pricks, and a foul sawdust burger for seven-fifty! This puts the Con in Convention all right!” Ashburn jabbed at them with his plastic fork: it pierced the paper plate, then snapped.
His fellow diner in the Canvey Biosports Studies College — an unlovely succession of glazed cubes in threadbare grounds, doubling as the venue for WeirdCon 2020 — ‘Doc’ Redbrook, flourished a bamboo and hessian lunchbox: “Hispi cabbage, corn and green chilli risotto, stewed windfall apples with heather honey — always bring my own. We can’t sex up the catering. Food stalls would be a concession issue, and it’d be whacked onto the ticket cost — though doubtless that lot would snap up sludge and pea shoots on chilli jam at a fiver a pop.”
He gestured at the busy rows of stalls, booths, trestles and pop-up shops in the college hall, offering the annual mix of ethical vitamins, mindfulness, horror fanzines, healing crystals, alt books, resin figurines, chakra jewellery, tarot cards, blended ritual incense, scented candles, and Potternalia.
Doc — the co-founder and Editor of Weird Stuff scrolled down his iPad. “Ashy, can you finish the Elements series for the next ish? We’re through with shag-foals, Winter Queens, hagstones, radiant boys, piskie-leading, fetches, bottomless pits, fairies, shug monkeys, hobmen, bullbeggars, boggarts and wraiths — it’s Water next. Can you chase up some water sprite or bugbear — a pic and two-and-a-half thousand words for next week? Send it to me or Lorna at the office. Got anything in mind?”
Ashburn grinned: “What about a pagan water sprite? Dragging naughty children, drunks, and hapless benighted wayfarers into the river and drinking their blood? Slime-caked; web-footed with long green tresses, teeth and claws like hay-rake tines. Strong homicidal tendencies. Cruel, implacable, with an insatiable lust for human life! Good for four cols?”
“I’m a Lakes Boy,” Doc replied. “We call her — always her, beautiful or a hag — Jenny Greenteeth. Some kind of fresh-water kelpie, able to shift forms — drowns her victims in pools, fens, dykes, rivers, lakes, cuts, reservoirs or stagnant pools? My godmother would scoot us past the lake’s edge at dusk and warn us that Jenny would dart out and gobble us up if we were naughty. I thought it was a bugbear invented to frighten children from the water — a metaphor for green weeds waiting to snare plump little limbs.”
“That’s her. Peg Powler along the Tees; Kutty Dyke on Dartmoor — or for us in the Fens, she was Nelly Longarms — always watching you hungrily from under the eel grass or water ferns when you fished for tiddlers, swam on hot days, or played near the bank’s soft edge, hoping the current would take you out to her. My gran said she lived amongst the stands of fen sedge and reed mace, combing her long green hair with a drowned babby’s bones, and that the wind in the rushes was her sighing.”
Doc pushed back his chair. “Invoice me for your petrol or rail fare and put-up. Must dash — it’s ‘UFOs over the Pennines’ next, then ‘Bigfoot Solved’ — anything to avoid another hour on bloody Rendlesham Forest!”
Ashburn chose the Norfolk Broads for his field trip because he liked revisiting the flatlands of his childhood: as a boy he’d cycled out from Swaffham to Saham Tovey, Wretton Fen, Bodrey and Langford, fishing gear cinched to the frame of his Raleigh Hercules, after tench, carp and rudd in the Wissey and its side creeks.
He’d already pre-drafted the piece in his head and decided on a course of action: put up at Queenie Duddon’s The Fat Eel, where the venison with black pudding mash was very fine; pitch in two paras of local hearsay, bracket it with context, and utilize that old standby, the local Gazette or Table Book. He’d uploaded an extract from The Gentleman’s Inquirer: 1782 — written by folklorist and antiquarian the Very Reverend Doctor Rawthey Twiss, B.A., M.A., D.Phil., D.Lit. Oxon:
Tremendous Distress Inflicted on Rustics by Infernal Water Faerie!
It being the evening after Higay Fair, two honest, sober fellowes, Jaabez Keckle and his pigman William Hepple, were returning on foot to Watermill Farm at Wretton Fen, occasioning to cross the Wissey by the stepping stones at Home Lane. There rose abruptly a monstrous apparition — both huge and hideous — who stretched out unnaturally long arms towards them, attempting to seize the wretched wayfarers and drag them to their deaths. They fled back to the opposite bank, but the ogre, exhibiting snake-like lockes, teeth like green daggers and eyes like burning saucers, failed to reach them.
Keckle and Hepple escaped, but their wits are feared for: Keckle has taken freely to gin and cannot be roused from his fireside. Hepple has implored the local Constable to lock him up, that he may be safe from the River Devil.
With a suitably murky pic of a riverbank for a header — that ought to clinch it Ashburn decided — and complete his last chapter of Boggarts, Sprites and Black Dogs: The British Weirdscape already commissioned by Denizen Press.
As the November rain slanted across the carriage window — there had been a record rainfall for the first week of the month with thirty-six flood warnings nationally, and the Great Ouse and Wissey were in full, muscular spate — Ashburn swiped and jabbed at his iPad for ‘bulk.’
Serious river pollution incidents with major fish and aquatic life kills were up by 14% to 17,684; only Romania and Slovakia had such an appalling record for contamination. Climate instability sucked the oxygen out of rivers in droughts, obliterating river and river-dependent biodiversity; triggering toxic algae blooms, which suffocated anything left in the cracked river bed. Then torrential rain sluiced the toxins downriver, drowning birds and mammals in their burrows and nests.
The Environment Agency’s staff had been slashed or seconded to DeFRA — supervising the deregulation, subsidy-cutting, or mass livestock incineration in Wales, Ireland and Cumbria; drastically reducing their capacity to police illegal abstraction and monitor toxic spills — and stretching their response time to public reports of pollution.
Major initiatives axed within the last year included a review of abstraction licences granted to privatized water companies; studies towards good ecological status, and a report on aquatic species’ diversity. Rivers seethed with microplastics, polythene bags, plastic bottles, takeaway packaging, cosmetic glitter flakes, boat fenders — and forty percent of Britain’s rivers and estuaries were now assessed as heavily polluted with raw sewage and agrichemical runoff.
There were 17,684 fully authorized “storm flaps” or emergency overflows that shat raw sewage into a third of rivers from banks or culverts: independent university teams and volunteer citizen scientists, with minimal toolkits and negligible funding, had already found growing traces of the planet’s most lethal viruses in rivers: Adenovirus, E.coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter, Leptospiasis: motherloads of immune-shredding, organ-imploding, blood-weeping Hell.
He clicked shutdown and looked at the bleary grasslands as the Swaffham train neared the little halt at Saham Towey. We are World Eaters, he thought: serial ingrates gorging on our own shit: we are screwed.
As taxi drivers go, Wilf — pre-booked for the five-miles following the Spodden, a side-creek off the Wissey, to The Fat Eel — was not exactly loquacious. He spoke only twice after Ashburn — half-drenched and already shivering — jumped in. His response to that old journo’s ploy — sound out a cab driver for local colour — was : “River Devil? Bollocks! It’d be an ‘ungry one if it fed on kids — them’r all indoors an’ pale as lard, jabbing at they screens. They never fishes or swims or go near the rivers! I was out cuttin’ reeds at fourteen with my granfer.”
As they rounded a bend, Wilf braked to weave around a tractor turning across them into a lane: “Jem Birket! Bad bloody seeds, ’im an’ Callum!”
Ashburn made out a blur of tatty outbuildings, a muddy yard and a lopsided sign: Watermill Farm.
As they settled up the fare outside the pub, Ashburn saw a coot — easily told by its distinctive all-black plumage and white bill — upending to feed in the creek; he heard its call, a soft kwoot.
A second call, scarcely half-uttered, and it was gone: torn away in a second of terrible speed and violence, enclosed by a huge mouth — marbled, grey-brown, and indistinguishable from the colours of the silt and reeds. “Pike!” grinned Wilf; “all teeth an’ muscle: cut right through prey — rather choke to death on what they take than drop a kill. Now that’s a monster!”
His bag unpacked and the patchy Wi-Fi checked, Ashburn took stock: he had a snug room overlooking the reeds and fast-shedding oaks; the rain was clearing, and the pleasant bar stocked Two Rivers’ beers together with a pleasing sweep of old malts.
The light was not yet draining; he could use his iPad to take some atmospheric shots of the two local feeds to the Great Ouse, the Spodden and the Croal. He’d be sure to include moody, washed-out tree roots and the deeper, middle pools were the rivers turned from pale to resinous; thick weed-clumps which he could name from childhood: Galingale, Bur-Reed, Water Horse Tail, Beak Sedge and Floating Sweet Grass.
There was the old packhorse bridge at Blackhazel — just a mile away: the river-throat widened there before meeting the cut off channel and sluice at Wretton Fen. It always had sweeps of eel weed, green, horizontal tresses, below it, and would suggest the liminal, troll’s lair look he wanted.
As Ashburn took his pictures, framing each one carefully, mindful of cropping, and worked his way downriver towards the bridge at Blackhazel, the Birket brothers were fastening their trailer to the same old Leyland tractor Wilf had cursed earlier. They had taken care to reverse it tightly up to the shippon. Callum unfastened the trailer’s side and Jem rigged boards sloping down to the mud.
“Now when it’s good an’ dark, we’ll be ready. It’ll be rainy and with a burr roun’ the moon. There’ll be no gorpers out at Stanford Water, but we must be fast. You must watch me, Cal — do as I do when it comes to the outfits or, by Christ we’ll both have the quackles and the screws and this stuff’ll fry us terrible.”
Callum nodded, and Jem led him into the shippon. Seven drums were stacked onto a raised wooden pallet — five standard 205-litre steel “tighthead” drums and two five-gallon ones.
Even from twelve feet away, they could see yellow crystals caked on top of each one, and fumes bit into the back of their throats. The drums each showed faded, blistered labels: Bensultap, Ametryn or Fenthion, with accompanying hazchem stickers and stencilled warnings: TRIPLE RINSE - FOLLOW EA GUIDELINES - USE A LICENSED DISPOSAL SITE - DO NOT INCINERATE - DO NOT CRUSH OR BURY - STORE IN DEDICATED COMPOUND. One carried a diagonal plastic Environment Agency sticker: NEVER LET CONTENTS ENTER STREAMS OR WATERCOURSES.
On reaching the old bridge at Blackhazel, Ashburn rested his i-Pad on the parapet and snapped at the river flowing underneath.
He thought of all the times he’d attended Psychic Vigils, “Summonings,” “Thin” Places — and never once seen anything; no sinister vapour, ‘orbs’, presences, nothing. He would rather like to see something. He’d interviewed the serially inadequate, the predisposed and the nutjobs — but also so many others: quiet, unremarkable; utterly certain of what they had experienced, adding clinching details: “Her eyes were red with weeping; he looked directly at me; she was laughing and hurrying, lighthearted, happy; I could smell tobacco and wet wool.”
“I wish I could see some manifestation,” he said aloud, there being only rooks and quietly grazing cattle for company. “Some proof of Elsewhere, even if it wasn’t directly intended for me.”
To his horror, at that moment, he caught his wedding ring on a ridge of mortar and it fell away, into the water below, silently lost in the purl and hiss: there was the tiniest glint, and then it was gone into the heart of the river.
Copyright © 2022 by Keith Davies
