It should have known better. This pond had been hers for a very long time even by her species' reckoning, and there was no way its elders hadn't warned it. Any daredevil youngster who put their plump fingers into her domain could expect to have them bitten right off and fair do’s.
Jenny was sitting on the bottom of her pond with her prize, a boy who wouldn't be soft enough to eat comfortably for another two days. He was rich with fat and muscle — she'd had a nibble, of course, but he'd be better if she could wait. She might not have the time.
The water felt what happened on land and told her. It sent her the vibrations of many people stomping on the ground between the pond's edge and her lean-to. It passed on movement and it refracted light. A flickering orange suggested the mob was burning her home.
Her hair mingled with the duckweed when she poked the top of her head above the water. Yes, the lean-to was burning and humans were bustling about around it, shrieking and wailing. This was not the order of things. They were breaking the rules.
'There she is!'
A beam of light blinded her and she dived down again.
Feet pounded the ground, coming closer. She moved to the very deepest part of the pond, just off centre, and took her prize with her. She had a lair there, a hollow, sheltered by branches she'd pulled down, bound together with waterlily-stems and reinforced with frog bones. She kept her prizes there. For marination.
And if things went badly, like now, she could shelter there for some time. She didn’t need to breathe too often.
The first stone that came drifting through the water landed closer to her than she was comfortable with but embarrassingly far from where she had been.
People. Their sense of distance was as bad as their grasp of tradition.
Another stone followed, further away but larger. Soon a multitude of stones, large and small, round and jagged, sank through the water. One, but only one, bounced against the roof of her shelter. She collected it and used it to help wedge the prize safely into the lair.
*
'I don't know why people are afraid of the pond,' Conrad said, 'but everyone is.' It was a hot, sultry day and more than anything he wanted a dip. Not in the mill pond, but here, now, away from the eyes of adults. He was hoping to get the girls — and the boys, but really, the girls — to come too. There were ten of them gathered on the grass, from littl'uns to mature thirteen-year olds like himself.
'Granny says Jenny Greenteeth lives there and will eat you if you go too close,' said Alice, thumb in her mouth as always.
Conrad sneered. 'What does your granny know? She thinks automobiles put cows off their feed. She's living in the past.'
'My grandmother says the same,' said Beata and put a hand on Alice's shoulder. Beata was from a good family, like Conrad's own. If only Beata came for a dip, Conrad would die happy.
'And do you always do as your granny says?' Conrad asked with a grin he'd been practising. A cheeky grin, a rogue's grin. He considered wiggling his eyebrows but thought that might be too much.
'Actually, yes,' Beata said. She laughed. 'It's my mother I disobey.' The girls giggled and the boys guffawed.
Conrad saw his chance. 'Would your mother want you to come swimming with me?'
'Of course not,' Beata said. 'She'd want me to stay at home and read edifying books. Practice my letters and my numbers.'
'So swim with me!' Conrad said. He stood up and held his hand out.
'You go first,' Beata said, 'I dare you.'
Conrad threw off jacket, shoes and socks on his way to the pond's edge. The water was deep and dark. Willows and rushes shaded the edges on the far bank and here and there floated islands of duckweed. Pond skaters flitted about and, as he was watching, a single air bubble broke on the surface. Conrad frowned and crouched down to get a better view. Where had that come from?
He stared at the water for a long time, focusing hard on the spot where he'd seen the air bubble. There was something there, something round and dark. He moved closer. What was it? His hand hovered above the water’s surface and then sank in, trying to reach the thing he thought he could see. The water was cool against his skin. Behind him the other children talked. Above him the sun beat down.
Something grabbed Conrad’s wrist and yanked him off his feet. From one moment to the next he was under water, flailing, being pulled deeper into the pond by arms like shackles. He would never know that his friends ran to the edge of the pond, reaching for him, that Beata went in the water to try to find him. She came out quickly, covered in green slime, shaking her head. She'd seen nothing but darkness down there.
Conrad saw darkness too. But not for long.
*
Jenny was patient. She was willing to wait until the people disappeared. She came up for air every few hours, spent the rest of her time with her prize, taking a nibble here, a nibble here. He was ripening well. On the second day she'd torn his shirt off and let the pieces float to the surface. Judging from the increased activity around the pond, that had been a bad idea. Long sticks pulled the material out of the water, then poked into the deep, trying to get her out.
Someone took a boat out on the pond, sinking a weight in to measure its depth. Later, men shot the surface of the water making tiny lead pellets rain down to Jenny. She chewed one but spat it out.
*
The fourth day the activity on the shore had calmed down and Jenny was beginning to feel safe in her underwater home. Then, when the sun was at its zenith, she heard a boat come out on the water. There were three people in it, one manning the oars, slipping and pulling through the water, the other two talking quietly. They eased off and drifted to the centre of the pond. Jenny could see the dark outline of the boat above her, sunlight shooting green spears around the vessel’s shadow.
A great rocking took the boat and something fell into the water, sinking rapidly. It landed on the bottom of the pond with a heavy thump that raised a cloud of silt.
Jenny smiled and clapped her teeth together. Were they feeding her now? She swam out of her lair and waited for the silt to settle.
Slowly a creature made from metal and leather emerged standing on the bottom of the pond. Ropes snaked from its head and waist up to the surface. The creature wobbled back and forth for a second then started moving around.
Jenny swam closer. She touched the creature’s skin, once lightly, then once with more force, poking a sharp nail into soft flesh. The creature jerked violently, turning around.
It wasn’t a creature but a person in a contraption. Behind glass panels in the metal head a pale face looked out at Jenny. She smiled at it. It opened its mouth in a silent scream, exposing blunt yellow teeth.
She didn’t notice the harpoon until the person tried to stick her with it. Jenny swam up and around, hiding herself behind his back. She poked at him again and again, digging her nails through his leather covering, watching him flail with the harpoon, stumbling around and making the silt rise in eddies.
It was fun.
It was even more fun when she pushed him over and he couldn’t get up. Eyes screwed close he tugged at one of the ropes and started rising from the bottom.
Jenny frowned, perplexed. She squinted up at the surface and the boat there. Something was pulling him up. It took her 20 seconds to bite through the rope and three to bite through the air tube.
The person in the suit waved his arms and tried to compress the air tube to stop the water from coming in.
There was a commotion when someone from the vessel tried to dive down to help. Jenny slashed his face with her claws and he fled back to the boat.
Jenny watched as the person in the contraption rose and tried to walk to the side of the pond. He stumbled over a boulder and fell over again. He floundered. He choked. And died.
The last thing he saw was Jenny’s eyes on the other side of the glass.
*
‘We have to do something,’ the man with the bloody face said. ‘We just lost Tommy.’
‘We should do nothing,’ said the woman cleaning his wounds. ‘Leave Jenny be, it’s her pond.’
‘Come now, granny, no one believes in those stories any more.’
‘And see what good that did you: a boy and his father killed, you hurt.’
‘Whatever monster is in the pond isn’t a child-eating, green-haired woman. It’s something else. A crocodile, most likely.’
Granny rolled her eyes. ‘And where did this crocodile come from, then?’
‘Poison,’ said a second man. ‘We’ll poison the pond. Throw in meat laced with rat poison, sink a hundredweight of arsenic in.’
The man Jenny had scratched smiled and then winced in pain. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘let’s poison the pond.’
*
Jenny was patiently prising the tinned man out of his suit when she realised that the water tasted odd. It had a tang to it, a metallic flavour she didn’t like. She swam up to the surface to see what was going on. The people on the bank were putting something in the water. She dived down again, shaking her head. She really didn’t like the taste.
It was time to leave.
She tugged what was left of her little snack free from the lair. Staying on the bottom of the pond she swum towards the bank, using the harpoon to push the snack in front of her. The closer she got, the worse she felt. The water was very bad. She gave a last push, releasing the snack to rise to the surface and took off to the opposite side of the pond.
It did not take long for the screaming to start. Everyone on the bank ran to see what it was that had risen, pale and bloated, out of the water. It wasn’t the crocodile they had hoped for.
While they fished the snack out of the water, crying and shouting all the while, Jenny clambered up on the opposite bank. She hid under the branches of a willow. Snatching up a handful of duck weed she melted away, finding a tree to wait in until the sun went down.
*
‘Jenny Greenteeth doesn’t cry,’ Granny said to Beata and Alice, ‘she feels no sorrow for those she drowns. Sorrow is left to us.’
Beata hugged Alice. The younger girl’s tears were running down her cheeks and staining her apron, new for the funeral.
*
Jenny mourned her lost home. Moving across land was slow and painful. She rested in wells or ponds during the day but at night her skin dried and cracked, her hair snagged on branches and her feet were cut on stones. Cool tears, slow-running and sticky, kept her face malleable as she sniffed the air for water and continued walking towards a new home. She hoped to find one free of people. People ruined everything.
(c) Caroline von Schmalensee, 2020
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