“Well, I don’t see why it can’t be us from the past. It might be summat what we did as we’ve forgot about, for all you know!”
Marjorie smiled as she turned back and carried on along her own path over the inexpert patchwork of the grass, towards the distant trees. She thought about the first time she’d seen Reggie, on the night she’d drowned. He hadn’t had his bowler on, on that occasion. Or his coat. Or anything, now that she stopped to think about it.
The Nene Hag had turned its elongated face away from her, revealing a disturbing profile like an alligator with a beak. Its flat brow had been corrugated by a frown of puzzled irritation as it squinted through the underwater shadows, looking for the source of the commotion, the splash that had just distracted it before it could begin its awful soul-destroying work on Marjorie.
Some way off, flailing in the grey murk of the river, there had been a naked boy — or at least, there had been the displaced spirit of a naked boy, with all the extra naked arms and legs that Marjorie would later realise were the mark of someone dead. Still clutched tight in the Hag’s webbed claw, she’d felt the Undine’s bafflement: after a long drought with no suicides or accidents for the monstrosity to claim, had fate delivered it two offerings in one night?
The boy was long and white and thin, plummeting down towards the silt and pram wheels of the riverbed. While he was not, perhaps, the beauty that her bathing Roman lad had been, he was at least young, probably much younger than the paunchy old drunks that had typified Enula’s catches from the outset. Also, most importantly of all, he was a male. In every likelihood the creature had not actually been looking forward to dismantling Marjorie, given its antipathy for females and especially for those too young to have developed a real personality that would be worth taking to pieces. For an instant, the Nene Hag stared at the struggling nude figure through the sub-aquatic gloom while weighing up the options, and then it made its decision. The three pallid crab-leg fingers holding Marjorie were suddenly withdrawn as the Hag lunged against the sluggish current, making an upriver dart towards the clearly helpless youth. It was at this point that things had begun to happen rather quickly, so that Marjorie had only pieced together later what had actually occurred.
Newly released, floating there dazed and frightened in the lightless waters with her incorporeal form gradually drifting up in the direction of the surface, Marjorie had watched the Hag’s fresh prey as the bare boy alighted on the muddy river-bottom. She’d had time to notice that he’d landed in a crouching posture which appeared to be planned and deliberate, in contrast to the aimless thrashing that he’d demonstrated up until that moment. As the entire stupefying length of the huge Undine nosed towards him through the blackness, he even appeared to have a grin across his freckled, snub-nosed features.
It was then that something plunging down into the water from above them had grabbed Marjorie beneath the arms and hauled her up into the clear night air, which she’d discovered she no longer needed now she wasn’t breathing anymore. She’d known a moment’s dread during which she believed herself to now be in the grip of some enormous astral herring-gull when she had had only just escaped the clutches of a massive ghostly eel, but these fears were displaced by genuine bewilderment once Marjorie had truly grasped her situation.
What was dragging her aloft had turned out to be something even odder than the giant phantom bird of her imaginings, in that it had seemed to be a trained trapeze act comprised of two upside-down ghost-children and a lot of eerily-suspended rabbit corpses. A small boy was holding Marjorie beneath the arms, his ankles held in turn by a girl who looked somewhat older and was dangling with her buckled shoes wedged in the forked branch of an ancient tree that overhung the river. Wrapped around her neck was a long piece of string from which swung all the velvet carcasses that Marjorie had noticed. This at least explained why the dead animals had looked like they were floating, but not why the girl was wearing them as jewellery in the first place.
The pair of young aerialists had evidently sliced down through the surface of the water in an arc to snatch up Marjorie, with their momentum carrying all three of them high up into the air as though upon a dangerously stoked-up swing. Right at the peak of their trajectory, the little hands beneath her arms had let Marjorie go and she’d sailed upward, cart-wheeling into the starlight with a dreamy slowness, just as though the air were made of honey. In an instant, her two rescuers came streaking from below her to arrest her tumbling ascent, with this time each child grasping one of Marjorie’s outstretched and wildly flapping hands. Linked like a charm bracelet the trio had sailed further up into the night through the thick, gluey atmosphere until they’d hovered, treading nothingness, some fifty feet above the Nene and looking down at its slow silver ribbon, its reflected constellations.
That was when the naked adolescent boy came rocketing up from the river as though fired out of a submarine, with a long stream of photo-reproductions trailing through the dark behind him. Marjorie remembered thinking that this would explain the crouch with which the lad had landed on the riverbed, the better to propel himself up from the depths into those starry altitudes after he’d served as a diversion for the ghastly river-nymph. No sooner had she thought this than the placid Nene below exploded, shattered from beneath by a ferocious impact that had made all of the children scream and not only the relatively inexperienced Marjorie.
Rearing up to treetop level out of the benighted torrent came the first thirty or forty feet of the Nene Hag, as if some hurtling underwater train had jumped the rusted tracks to fling itself into the sky. The creature’s long umbrella fingers were extended to their fullest with the grey and blotchy membrane stretched tight in between them as the towering, swaying monster raked the air in an attempt to capture its escaping prey. The nude boy’s earlier grin of self-assurance had been swapped for an expression of surprise and terror as he realised belatedly the mer-thing’s true extent and reach. Kicking his legs and doing what appeared to be a vertical front-crawl the plucked and plucky youngster shot beyond the swaying horror’s grasp, into the safety of the sequinned heavens over Paddy’s Meadow, where Marjorie and the other spectral children floated, breathless with excitement and mortality.
The Undine shrieked in its frustration and its rage, its disproportionately tiny forelimbs clutching uselessly at empty space for several seconds before it gave up and, with a disappointed wail that chilled its nervous audience, fell back towards the Nene like a collapsing chimneystack. There was no splash as its great insubstantial length hit the material surface of the water, only an unnerving final moan having the sound of something that had once been very close to human speech but which had turned into a strangled bellow through disuse. For one appalling instant it had sounded as though it were trying to say “Gregorius”.
And after that, once Marjorie had been formally introduced to the Dead Dead Gang, they’d all drifted light as thistledown towards the point a little further up the grassy bank where Reggie Bowler had left all his hurriedly discarded clothing underneath a squeaking, listing death-trap called a Witch’s Hat which was erected in the children’s playground there upstream. Along the way they’d passed above a bobbing parcel, turning slowly in the petrol sheen and pond-scum on its way to Spencer Bridge, which Marjorie had scrutinised for some time without realising it was her; her human envelope, its ugly glasses gone at last, its lungs all filled with water.
She had also spotted bloody, bloody, silly bloody India, who, as it turned out, could swim after all. The dog was scrabbling up onto the bank, where next it shook itself and then commenced to trot beside the water, barking as it kept pace with the drifting body. That had been that. Chapter Seven: The Dead Dead Gang versus the Nene Hag. That had been Marjorie’s short life.