Ruth Estevez

The Monster Belt

Reeds tickled Jordan’s ankles and he kicked; lean, tanned arms thrusting into breaststroke. As he broke through the lake’s surface and gulped in warm summer air, shouts and squeals greeted him. Standing on the wooden jetty, as if she were their football coach, Joanna, dressed in her signature red, shouted the loudest.

‘It’s Max next,’ she yelled. ‘Everyone else get back. Jordan left me in charge.’

Jordan waved from the water. ‘Do as Jo says; she’s my deputy.’

Joanna looked at him without smiling. He could tell she was on the brink of tears. Only he’d be able to tell though. She’d always been good at hiding her emotions behind a tight mouth.

Spray erupted when his best mate, Max, hit the water. Everyone screamed and shouted, their feet thudding hollow on the bleached planks. The rowing boat tied to the jetty post swayed, a big whale-like thing none of them dared touch.

Jordan dropped his head back, soaking his brown hair darker and chilling his scalp. There wasn’t one single cloud, only the thickest blue all the way from the treetops and up to the Odda hill that swept along the perimeter of the valley. Two figures were visible on the top, two of the sixth-form girls who’d mooched past half an hour or so ago. He’d thought the ginger one was going to point to the rickety ‘No Swimming’ sign in the water, but she hadn’t said a word.

‘I don’t care if we shouldn’t be in here,’ he thought. ‘What’s the point of having a lake in your village if you can’t swim in it on a baking hot day?’

‘Next!’ Joanna’s voice bounded over the water.

Jordan looked at the jetty to see who was at the front. Kate hardly made a splash with a vertical streamlined entry, so close to the jetty she could have scraped her back on it. Immediately, Sonny cartwheeled off the end. Fred and the rest of the littlies applauded.

They bobbed up and down. ‘Me, me!’

Joanna stood with hands on hips. Her fall-back pose. Callum leapt, cycling through the air. The littlies were standing in a clump, the front ones – with their toes curled over the edge – reluctant now. Joanna would wait for a suitable pause, pull down her prized shorts, flick them off her feet, vest top discarded to reveal an almost-identical scarlet swimsuit and then she’d dive – the only one apart from him who dared, probably making five somersaults before she hit the water. He wouldn’t begrudge her taking the limelight. Everyone knew he was the best. Two of the youngest summoned up their courage, pinching their noses with grubby fists. Eyes tight shut.

Jordan caught a flash of light reflected in the distance. Must be the lifeboat from Bridgecup. He strained upwards, palms flapping the water for a better view. The flashing reflection disappeared and, arms aching, he dipped below the water for a moment to cool his face. He could do this every day. All summer after they broke up for the holidays, not just weekends. They only had another week to go. His dad said it was going to be the hottest summer on record. Yeah, right. His dad said that every year.

He resurfaced, and from the jetty, Joanna shot him her defiant look. Everyone in the water turned to watch; shoulders like small shining boulders and sleek wet heads glinting in the bright sun. Jordan dipped under again. His ears filled with the gloopy silence of the lake. It was weird. He should resurface and watch Joanna dive her perfect line, but he’d seen her a million trillion times before and there seemed no need. He waited until he couldn’t hold his breath any longer before re-emerging to catch sight of the back of his friends’ heads. Silently, he slipped under a third time.

‘What are you doing?’ The words were as if someone else was speaking, not himself.

He hadn’t filled his lungs and he resurfaced immediately, opening his mouth too soon and gulping in water. Jo flashed red and small before he submerged again.

His chest tightened and a voice in his head whispered. ‘Why don’t they do something to help you?’

He couldn’t breathe. Dizzy, he panicked. Arms spread- eagled, he punched out his breath, only to gasp in air before descending again. This was serious. Beyond his control.

The lake gripped his feet, his legs, his entire body – and there was nothing he could do about the pain clasping his lungs.

‘Shout for help, you idiot.’

The words sounded distant. Not his. Not anybody’s. He reached up and readied himself. He didn’t care if Max and Joanna took the mick, he’d cry out this time. His head muddled. His legs didn’t move. He numbed with cold. Something touched his legs. He drifted down, gulping in water. It couldn’t be the Mere Monster reaching for him. It was only weeds. Don’t panic. He paddled, circling his legs as if climbing a ladder that wasn’t really there. Breaking through the surface, he opened his mouth. . Breathe in, then you will be able to shout. Max was laughing at him. That voice in his head. Max, Max! Help. Give us your hand. Max turned and yelled something at Joanna as Jordan slipped under again. They couldn’t tell he was silently crying out. His lungs filled with the lake. He couldn’t remember what he was supposed to shout anymore, his words drifting with plankton. Legs hanging straight, arms heavy, he sank deeper . . .

‘They’ll grab me in a second.’ The voice sounded hopeful.

Chapter One

Six years earlier

Dee

Eleven-year-old Dee Winter pushed back her ginger hair and rested her elbows on her knees. The water stretching beyond the wooden jetty could have been painted, it looked so still. Green, blue and black. Dee couldn’t see the bottom, only the edges where lush grass swooned. High up, trees stirred. Away to her right, a field of fawn grass, gone to seed, swayed a path towards the village. The only noise, a few crispy leaves scuttling over the sun-blanched boards of the pier.

At her side, the deserted rowing boat waited. Thick rope held it against one of the jetty posts. Oars rested top to toe, lodged in the bottom. Dee had never seen anyone take the boat out in all the times she’d wandered down to the lake with her mum or dad or any friends.

No one had. Not any of them.

Not even the older kids who dared each other into the water. ‘Don’t touch what doesn’t belong to you,’ her mum said.

She’d love to have pretended she was the Lady of Shalott in the poem they’d just read at school, and floated in the boat right across the lake to the island in the middle.

No one went there either.

At their end of the lake, no one did much but stroll on the bank. All the activity was at the other end, where Bridgecup village gathered its boat club and water sports and the police launch. So far away it could be a different world. She’d jumped in the lake once and her mum had told her that she had a kamikaze streak.

‘What’s that?’ she’d asked. Her mum didn’t answer straight away. And when she did explain the family secret, Dee understood why her mum waffled on about some uncle they never saw and inherited character traits. No one wanted to bluntly tell their daughter she had a death wish.

Dee looked down at her legs. They were still pale, even though she’d worn her orange and white shorts all summer.

‘You’ve got sun kisses on your nose,’ her mum said, as if that was a consolation.

‘I hate freckles.’

‘You won’t be wrinkly when you’re older like those who spend all day in the sun.’

‘I’m the only one with ginger hair!’

‘Auburn.’

Dee shouted a lot in summer.

‘Why do we have to live so far away from everything?’ she asked.

‘When you’re grown-up, you’ll look back on your childhood and be grateful we had no broadband or signal in Thorpemere.’ Her dad was good at repeating the same answer to her perpetual question.

Thorpemere bunkered down in the hills. Hardly anything technical could reach it. It didn’t matter though. Not really. Dee only moaned about living so far from civilisation just to sound as if she cared. When she saw someone with a phone, or anyone spoke about what they had seen online, it sounded like a nightmare to juggle and she already had enough nightmares of her own to keep under control.

Leaning back, enjoying the calm, she rested her palms on the smooth wood and gazed at the water. Midges had appeared, hovering in clouds close to the lake’s edge. The sun dipped lower in the sky. The water darkened. Small waves glistened over the surface towards her and she watched the circles expand. They grew and grew until they disintegrated against the bank. She waited and it happened again from the same point.

Maybe there were ghosts in the Mere. Maybe all those who’d disappeared there were trying to get out. The mossy back of the ‘No Swimming’ sign didn’t take any notice.

She decided to test if there really were ghosts of those that had drowned. ‘Hello, Joseph Smith,’ she said. ‘Or is it Gregory Pike today? Jacob Turner? John Baker? Is that you in there?’

The undulations almost touched the jetty posts and, rapidly firing out names, she scrambled to her feet. She couldn’t be bothered with surnames when there were so many with the same first names. So many Williams, Bernards and Johns. She knew all of them. She’d studied the monument on the village green enough times. Ripples appeared elsewhere on the water, some spreading wider than others, interlapping and persistent. She knew it wasn’t fish. She knew it wasn’t any of the older kids sneaking down, and she hadn’t seen as much as a water fly land on the surface. Picking up her sandals, she backed up the smooth boards of the jetty, she couldn’t face another monster, not today in the sunshine.

‘You shouldn’t have gone in!’ she shouted.

Skirting the lake, a small copse of silver birch on her right, she glanced back at the water. Movement on the surface continued to circle out making twenty or so expanding spheres.

She jabbed her finger towards the ‘No Swimming’ sign.

‘You shouldn’t have gone in the Mere. If you’d stayed on the bank, the Mere Monster wouldn’t have got you!!’

Chapter Two

Perfect Miss Gordon stood in front of the windows of the Year 6 classroom, blocking the view of the sunset over Whitlow Moor.

‘Legends aren’t the same as facts,’ she said, lingering on each ‘s’ like an adder snaking through wet grass. ‘But mysteries lend themselves to supposition which leads, over time, to myth and legend and, over more time, people believe these myths to be fact – and this is exactly what has happened with the Mere Monster.’

Dee shot up her hand.

‘Is it a fact no one knows where their bodies are?’ she asked. Miss Gordon cast her pearly lidded eyes around the class.

Even those half-asleep sat up with interest. ‘Who can spell supposition?’

Their teacher walked to the board and started writing in her spider scrawl without responding to Dee’s arm waving.

‘Su-po-sssss-i-she-un.’ As she wrote, she sounded out the word.

Dee wasn’t fooled. She had her own idea. Legend had it that the Mere Monster weaved through the tinge of green, threading its weighty curves among the reeds. It wrapped around bare legs and dragged the unlucky swimmer into dark caves, digesting the young body before spewing out their bones. The adults whispered about icy underground streams pouring down from surrounding hills and continuing their path through the depths of the Mere. These freezing streams found deep-buried channels that forged their way below the valley’s meadows and all the way to the sea.

‘Miss . . . do you think bones are scrunched up with seashells on Scarborough beach and people on holiday pick them up and put them in their plastic buckets?’ asked Dee.

‘Su-po-sssss-i-she-un.’

‘Do you think they take them home at the end of their holiday and put them in their gardens? Do you, miss? That could be a fact, miss.’

Miss Gordon’s pearly pink lips disappeared for a moment. ‘Sometimes, Delia, your imagination could be called supposition.’ The class sat in silence.

Perfect Miss Gordon, with her pastel skirt and stiff hair framing her gleaming blue eyelids and frosted mouth. She walked back to stand against the blue sky, making the spider plants on the low windowsill shiver. Dee wondered how a teacher could look so perfect when, if you slit her open from throat to stomach with the scissors from the craft drawer, you would gaze into a vast, cavernous black hole.

She wanted to know so much more than Miss Gordon ever told them. Too young to attend the annual Cryptozoology convention, the Monsti-Con, as everyone called it, she struggled to contain her curiosity.

She pushed her thick auburn hair off her flushed cheeks.

‘D’you think, Miss Gordon?’ Dee said. ‘Do you think the monster eats the bones along with everything else, including fingernails and hair and even the eyeballs so there’s nothing left? Could that be the facts?’

‘It’s almost home time,’ Miss Gordon looked at her delicate gold wristwatch. ‘We will have to continue this another day but before you go, Year 6, I have an announcement to make.’

Miss Gordon had an ace up her cardigan sleeve; Dee knew it and she didn’t like it.

‘I want to tell you about what we’ll be doing tomorrow,’ Miss Gordon announced, ‘because it’s a real treat for you all that I have taken great pains to organise.’

Everyone sat still. Nobody wanted to be clearing away and miss it. Dee didn’t care. She started zipping up her pencil case. Miss Gordon could deflect all she wanted, Dee wasn’t having any of it. Across the table, she caught Claire’s eye and they grinned at each other. Claire wasn’t having any of it either. The rest were more gullible. Already the whispering had started.

‘Are we going to Flamingo Land, Miss?’

‘Can we go to London?’

Miss Gordon shook her head, hands clasped over her love-heart-coloured skirt.

‘The Dungeons at York, Miss? Can we leave Jamie there?’

‘Whitby? I want to see pirates!’

‘Australia!’

Eventually, she quietened them down.

‘As we’ve been talking so much this term about legends and, in particular, about the Mere Monster . . .’

‘Twenty-four children are dead, aren’t they, miss?’ said Archie Baker.

‘All twenty-four of them were strong, competent swimmers,’ added Gail Meredith, carefully articulating the words.

‘They’re never on their own either. They’re the popular ones, nothing ever goes wrong for them . . .’

‘Until the Mere Monster gets them! Aghhh!’ Archie Baker shouted, slipping from his chair on to the floor.

‘Archie.’ Miss Gordon reprimanded.

‘But, miss . . . I know,’ said teacher’s pet, Hazel Thompson. ‘It’s because they’re the best swimmers so they take more risks and swim out further than anyone else.’

Fact.

‘And deeper.’

‘Where there are weeds,’ added her friend, Alison. Facts two and three; Dee charted them up.

Hazel shot Alison a look that could kill.

Silenced, Alison leant back, tears brimming.

‘And deeper,’ repeated Hazel. ‘They get tangled up in the weeds and . . .’

‘Where’s the dobbies?’ Dee interrupted. ‘No one ever finds their dobbies.’

Silence. For a moment. Then laughter. ‘I think you mean, bodies, Delia?’

Dee flushed scarlet. Why did she sometimes get her letters mixed up? Everyone, including Claire, was laughing, even though Claire was trying not to. ‘Bodies!’ Dee shouted. ‘I meant bodies!’

Silence. For another moment.

‘Please, sit down, Delia. This will have to wait for another day,’ said Miss Gordon – patience personified, as Dee’s dad would say. Dee sat down. Still red and hot. She pressed her fingers together. Hard.

‘We have been talking about reasons why we shouldn’t swim in the Mere, so to continue the theme, I have booked the school minibus to take us somewhere safe where we can swim.’

Everyone waited. Miss Gordon looked impatient. She opened her arms.

‘We’re going to the wonderful new swimming baths in Hazelton!’

She didn’t get the cheer she expected.

‘It’s not new, miss. It was built last year, miss,’ Archie informed her.

‘So I want you all to remember your swimming costumes and a towel . . .’

Dee shook her head at Claire. ‘I’m not going,’ she whispered.

‘All your parents have signed consent forms, so no one has to worry about asking permission.’

Dee shot up her hand. ‘I didn’t take one home, miss. I must have been away.’

‘They were signed at parents’ evening, Delia, no need to worry. Now, I want you to all come prepared in the morning for the treat I’ve arranged because we’ve all been working so hard.’

‘We?’ Claire pulled a face.

‘What if my swimsuit is in the wash, miss?’ Dee said.

‘If anyone forgets their costume, they can always wear one of the school spares,’ Miss Gordon announced.

There came a collective wail of disgust.

‘I’m going to be ill.’ Dee pulled a face at Claire, who laughed, catching Miss Gordon’s attention.

‘Delia Winter, stand up.’

Dee scraped her chair noisily on the brown parquet floor. The sun glowed around Miss Gordon’s head, but the halo didn’t fool Dee.

Dee hated the swimming pool in Hazelton. The cubicles were too small with wooden seats, usually soaking wet and if, struggling to undress in the cramped space, she inadvertently touched the plastic curtain, it clung to her back like a sheet of freshly pasted wallpaper. Cold feet on a wet floor. Goose-pimpled skin. Bouncing sound. Exposure.

She stared at Miss Gordon and Miss Gordon stared back. This was it. Miss Gordon was going to explode and splatter her putrid black entrails over the entire class.