Then one dismal morning her young man had gone, as had his cohorts. The abandoned river-fort became a crumbling playhouse for the local children and, within a few years, had been scavenged and dismantled to the point where it no longer served as anything at all. She’d waited and she’d waited, writhing in frustration down amongst the silt and sediment, but she had never seen Gregorius again, nor any of his kind. There had been no more flowers, but only night-soil flung upon her bosom by the hairy, slouching Britons when they rose each morning. Clearly, she was not regarded as even a demigoddess any longer and, accordingly, down in her cold, resentful darkness she’d begun to change.
She’d been so lonely. That was what had altered her by inches, turning her from lovely Nenet, Nendra or Enula to the Nene Hag, to the mile-long thing she was today. Her simple solitude had fashioned her into a monster, had precipitated all the desperate actions since then. All the drowned souls she’d claimed, all of them taken only for companionship.
She’d held herself back, had restrained her urges for some several centuries before she’d given in and grabbed a ghost as it was struggling to escape its bobbing body. She had been aware that once that step was taken it was irrevocable, a vile crime of the spirit from which there could be no turning back. That’s why she’d put the moment off for so long, why she’d hesitated until the idea of an eternal life without love could not be endured another instant. That point had been reached one summer night in the ninth century, almost a thousand years ago. The man’s name had been Edward, a stout crofter in his fortieth year or so, who’d tripped and fallen in the river as he’d made his way home through the dark fields with a belly full of ale. Edward had been her first.
These were not pleasant things from her perspective, neither Edward’s taking nor their subsequent relationship. She’d never really bothered to consider what the drowned man’s own view of such matters might have been. During the years they’d spent together, Edward had appeared to be in a continuous state of shock or trauma anyway, right from the moment when she’d closed her huge webbed hand around his thrashing and disoriented spectral body. In his widening eyes she’d caught her first glimpse of what she must look like now, the way that she must seem to them, the humans. Even if she should be fortunate enough to find a new Gregorius, how would she stop him screaming at what she’d become?
Edward, of course, had screamed at first — long bubbling spirit-noises that were somewhere between sound and light. Eventually, he’d fallen silent of his own accord and had retreated to the glazed and trance-like state in which he’d stayed for the remainder of their courtship. He became a paralysed and staring pet-toy, drifting and inert as Nendra or Enula batted him this way and that between her crab-leg fingers or attempted to communicate with him. Unable to elicit a response that went beyond a moan, a twitch or a convulsion, the Nene Hag had at last settled for a one-way conversation that went on uninterrupted for the full five decades he was with her. She unburdened herself of her many trials and disappointments, several times, and even told him of the day when she had chased Gregorius’s clotted sperm to the freshwater limits of her territory. He made no sign that he heard or understood her utterances, and she might have thought that she had no effect upon him whatsoever were it not for the continuing disintegration of his personality, shedding layers of awareness in an effort to escape the unrelenting horror of his circumstances. Finally, when Edward had no more self than a knot of driftwood, Nenet let him go. A piece of ghostly flotsam, used-up and sucked dry of its vitality, she’d watched as he was swirled away towards the east, towards the sea, still silent and still staring.
Then she’d gone and caught another one.
How many had there been since then? Two dozen? Three? The Nene Hag had lost count and had by now forgotten most of her companions’ names. She thought of all of them as “Edward”, even the half-dozen women that she’d netted down the decades, when she thought of them at all. Some of them had been more responsive to her presence than the first Edward had been. Some of them had tried pleading with her, some had even asked her questions as they’d struggled through their fear to comprehend her and to understand the nightmare they were caught in. All of them, however, would sink into her first suitor’s catatonic state, sooner or later. And when there was almost nothing left, when consciousness had shrunken to a numb, insensate dot, she would get rid of them. When their eyes ceased to follow the rare shafts of sunlight filtered from above as through a dirty glass, when their whole souls went limp and did not move thereafter, when there was no longer even Nendra’s dreary entertainment to be had from them she sent them off upon her stately and unhurried currents, never wondering what became of them, whether they would remain as mindless husks until the end of time or if they might one day recover. Mute and unresponsive she had no more use for them, and there were always more fish in the stream.
It — for it was most certainly an ‘it’ by now — had only taken women when no men were to be had, having arrived at the conclusion that ghost females caused more fuss than they were worth. Most of the women, it was true, had lasted longer than the men before withdrawing to a vegetative torpor, but they’d also been more fierce and frightened and had fought harder as well. Combining with Enula’s natural antipathy to its own former gender, this resistance had brought out a streak of cruelty in the Nene Hag’s nature, where before had only been abiding loneliness and bleak embitterment. One of the female Edwards who’d got on the creature’s wrong side had been slowly psychologically dismantled, picked apart in tumbling flakes of astral fish-food and then, after almost ninety winters, had been flung away. The ancient sub-aquatic phantasm had been surprised by the response that this deliberate torture had awoken in it: a dim, distant glimmer of sensation that was almost pleasure. Obviously, once discovered, this new tendency to inflict suffering had rapidly become more urgent, more pronounced, more necessary to the river-monster’s equilibrium.
It hadn’t caught a child before. It hadn’t felt the need, regarding them as minnows, no more than a mouthful when there was a great abundance of more adult sustenance to hand with each new year, all of the accidents and suicides. The nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, however, had been something of a lean stretch on account of the increasing numbers that were learning how to swim. Around the join of the two periods, Nenet had noticed with disdain an old man giving swimming lessons to a flock of nude young boys there on the stretch of it that marked the old town’s western boundary. Infuriatingly, from waterside discussions it had overheard, it later learned that the long meadow in the area, near where Saint Andrew’s Priory once stood, had been renamed after this irksome Irish lifeguard, an ex-military man named Paddy Moore, and was now known as Paddy’s Meadow. Consequently, through the interfering efforts of such people, most of those who entered the Hag’s province would climb safely out again. The creature had been without company since it had let the remnants of her last associate go, sometime during the 1870s, but now its dry spell had come to an end. Now it had Marjorie.