Greenteeth Greenteeth

The witch looked surprised to see me, her eyes blinking furiously at me through murky waters. I don’t know why she was so astonished. It was my lake she’d been thrown into; she should have expected I’d come and see if there was anyone worth eating. It was an unseasonably hot day in early spring. The frogbit was just starting to regrow, bobbing up and down on the surface of the water, little green buds unfurling into the warm air. I was minding my own business like I always do, just doing a quick tidy up of loose roots at the base of the lake. The sunlight was glittering through the pond weed so I could see all the loose debris I hadn’t spotted during the dark winter months. I chivvied away a school of scarlet-finned perch who were crowding around some sunken branches and began to drag them out of the mud. I like to keep the lake looking neat and tidy. You wouldn’t know it from the surface, but my lake is spotless, with excellent water circulation and the best crop of brown trout in western England. Even my frogs look smarter than those in inferior lakes, though they taste much the same. I may not be human but that doesn’t mean I can let standards slip. Good lake maintenance is important for fish stocks and water quality, quite apart from the fact that I never could abide mess. A penchant for tidiness is not my most haggish feature to be sure, but then I’m not technically a hag. I’ve never been quite sure what it is that I am; apart from a Jenny, that is. Jenny Greenteeth, that’s my name. And it’s my mother’s, and her mother’s, all the way back upstream to the source of all the rivers and lakes in the country. It’s my daughter’s name too, though when she lived with me, I always called her Little Jenny and then she was Jenny in the Millpond by the Willow. I suppose my full name would be Jenny Greenteeth in the Lake at Chipping Appleby, but that’s more of a mouthful than I like so I just go by Jenny. Jenny by name and Jenny by nature is what my mother said we are, silly old bat that she was. Not an actual bat though, I should make that clear. Nothing wrong with bats and they make a tasty snack of a summer evening, but I’d rather be a Jenny. Flying seems much riskier than swimming. I’m sure your own mother or grandmother told you about Jenny Greenteeths. We make a good story for a winter’s night when the wind is howling down the chimney and the fire is casting long shadows on the wall. That’s the best kind of night for stories. I bet you liked to curl up with a blanket and listen to tales about the bogeymen, the pixies, and the hobgoblins. Jennys belong in fairy stories, and like the other fae creatures, we’re more real than your mothers would like to believe. If you thought those stories were old wives’ tales, it might surprise you to know that most of what they told you is true. My teeth aren’t green, that’s probably the biggest falsehood, but they are long, and sharp enough to bite a fish in half. That’s useful for a lake dweller. My skin is green, the same shade as the moss that furs the trees around the lake. My hair is green too, if I dry it out, but in the water it looks darker. I think I’m about the same height as a human, though it’s difficult for me to tell. Usually when I see a human, they’re either crawling away from me in horror or floating face-down in the lake. Not conducive to accurate height comparison. Did your mother warn you to stay away from waters you couldn’t see through? Did she tell you what might be lurking beneath a thick layer of lily pads, down in the silty waters of a lake or river, just waiting for a child to snatch up and drag down for her dinner? It’s good advice for a child living next to a lake with a Jenny in it, though it’s been a while since I felt up to any of that rigamarole. There’s a lot of eating to be got out of a child and most days I’m just not that hungry. I’d rather stick to fish or frogs or the occasional bag of kittens that some farmer throws in the lake. Right nice of them that is, I always thought, though it takes me ages to get the fur out of my teeth. I usually get a few bags of kittens in the springtime—when all the animals are having their babies. So, when I heard the splash that day in spring that was what I thought—the first unwanted litter of the year had been delivered by an obliging young fieldhand. I looked up from dislodging a rotten log and my immediate thought was that I’d have to track down a rabbit bone to use as a toothpick. I peered up through the water to see where the splash was coming from. I like to be quick about grabbing the bag, so the drowning isn’t so slow. Panicked meat always tastes bad to me, and I may be a river monster but I do have principles. My mother used to call me soft for that. When I spotted the edge of the splash at the surface, I noticed the ripples were larger than I would have expected for a sack of kittens. My hearing isn’t the best under water but now that I concentrated, I could hear some humans cheering. Or maybe humans laughing, or maybe even screaming. It’s difficult to tell the difference, humans are always making a noise for some reason or another. Maybe they’d rolled a cart or something into the lake and were going to make a big fuss about hauling it out. That would be entertaining indeed. The villagers are wary of my lake and if I sneaked up and grabbed one of their ankles they’d be guaranteed to shriek loud enough to wake the dead. I chuckled at the thought. Either way I wanted to investigate this disturbance, so I pushed off from the bottom and shot off through the water. I could feel my long hair streaming behind me as I swam, freshly combed out this morning, and I enjoyed the sense of the sunlight dappling on my skin. I opened my mouth to taste the lake water. There was something metallic that I could smell, possibly blood of some kind, but not much of it. The splash had come from the village side of the lake, and it took me a few minutes to swim over. I came up to just below the surface and peered through the frogbit. A small crowd of humans was gathered on the shore, waving their little pink arms in the air. I didn’t recognise any of their faces, but they all wore the dull linen clothes humans in the village had been wearing for hundreds of years, brown kirtles and britches and greying shirts. The people all looked much the same to my eyes, mostly too young for me to know any by name but too old to be playing childish games on my banks. One human, a male I thought, was standing facing away from me and shouting. He wore a big black hat and a dark overcoat of some kind, newer and less patched than the clothes of the others. He turned a bit so I could glimpse his face, small eyes and a pursed little mouth. His expression was twisted in anger, and he was pointing back at my lake. I thought he looked even sillier than the rest of them and sank back down from the surface. Satisfied that the humans weren’t going to come barging into the lake I looked around for whatever it was they had thrown in. There wasn’t anything floating on the surface so the cause of the splash must have sunk to the floor. I floated about a yard below the surface and twisted around to see where it had fallen. There! Just below me I spotted a trace of tiny bubbles coming up through the weeds. I kicked my legs up and dived a little deeper, brushing the leaves aside with long fingers. To my intense surprise a human was sitting on the bottom of the lake. A female human, I thought, with pale skin and big eyes. She was looking at me with an expression of shock and terror, as if I was a creature from her nightmares brought to life. I suppose that’s exactly what I was. I could tell she was a witch because she was holding one hand up to her mouth and had conjured a small globule of air around her fist. She was trying to breathe from the glob, but she hadn’t quite got the spell right and little bubbles of air kept creeping out of her nose and scurrying back to the surface. Every time she messed it up the main globule would shrink, and her fist would tighten a little, as if she was trying to hold the air there by sheer strength of grip. I didn’t think it was too clever of her to be sitting here trying to learn how to breathe underwater. Quite apart from the obvious hazard of river monsters, jumping into the literal deep end seemed an extreme way to practise, compared to, say, dunking your head in a bathtub. If this was a new trend among human witches then I didn’t like it. I’ve already said that I like to keep a tidy lake and strange witches jumping in and causing a commotion would be extremely vexing. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of her being here, but I did know that a Jenny always leads with her teeth. I opened my mouth wide and gave her my best smile. The witch’s eyes bulged even wider and the glob of air at her fist exploded in a fizz of effervescence. I was sure that now her air was gone she’d be zipping off back to the surface and leaving me in peace. To my surprise the witch just sat there, opening and closing her hand again, trying to regain the spell.