Ettie and the Midnight Pool (eBook)

Ettie’s desperate for a swim. She’s been helping Grandma in the garden all day but now at last she’s free. She runs down the hay meadow below High Fell House, clambers over the rickety stile to the beck. Mum’s old rope swing dangles from the branch of an oak tree close to the stream, but Ettie doesn’t stop there today. She clatters over the ancient stone footbridge and crosses the marshy field to the tarn. She wriggles out of her shorts and T-shirt and leaves them in a heap on the bank. She lowers herself over the muddy edge into the water.

Ahhh! So cold it takes her breath away. Even in late summer, on a hot day like today, the water never really warms up. She dips under as far as her waist, takes a deep breath, dips deeper, up to her shoulders. She gasps. It’s cold, but delicious. Sunlight shines through the peaty water and turns her legs and arms golden. Her feet slide over the slippery pebbles, green with weed. She kicks off and swims towards the reeds and water lilies further out.

The water’s deep, too deep for her to stand, but Ettie learned to swim when she was small, she’s a good swimmer – there’s no danger here, no currents or undertow. The water is smooth as silk. She flips onto her back and sculls with her arms, floats under the wide blue sky. A lone buzzard circles high above the tarn. The reflections of the hills make it look as if another world lies mirrored beneath the lake. She imagines diving into the upside-down world below.

She flips onto her front, takes a deep breath and swims underwater, kicks and glides through the shadowy depths. She chases a shoal of silver minnow but the tiny fish dart and scatter, much too quick for her. What would it be like to have fins and gills? She comes back up for air and swims to the bank. She climbs out, dries herself, gets dressed.

The buzzard calls, a high, wild lonely cry.

Ettie calls back: Eee-uu! Eeee-uuu!

The bird circles over the valley, soars higher, glides away toward Fletcher’s Wood.

She’ll follow the buzzard. Go the wild way, up through the trees.

It’s too still, too quiet in Fletcher’s Wood, even for a hot August afternoon. Ettie steps over the mounds of green moss and climbs uphill between the trees. Something’s different today.

No one walks the old paths any more – over many years they’ve been swallowed up by grass and bramble and nettles. Ettie finds her own way through the trees. They fall silent as she enters their enchanted space, as if she’s interrupted something secret. And usually, after a while, the trees and creatures relax. The birds start to sing again. They sense she presents no danger. But not today.

The deep quiet makes Ettie uneasy. All her senses are on high alert. A buzzard overhead might scare the songbirds into silence, but there’s no sign of the buzzard now. Even the rooks are silent.

She shivers. What is it? What’s been here in Fletcher’s Wood, just moments before her?

She carries on up the hill.

Something is moving ahead of her through the shady woods. The shadowy shape slips between the silver birch trees, pauses, moves on again.

A deer?

It makes the faintest, softest sounds as it treads delicately on the fallen leaves and damp earth. A twig cracks. Leaves rustle as the deer pushes through the undergrowth.

Ettie steps silently behind, following the deer.

Under the tree canopy, it’s too dark for her to see what kind of deer it is – but just ahead the trees thin out and shafts of sunlight stream through the gaps.

Oh!

Ettie stops dead still.

It’s not a deer!

Her heart beats faster.

It’s a person!

She’s never seen anyone in these woods – never seen anyone, anywhere, in all her wanderings, all the years she’s lived at High Fell House. Grandma and Ettie are the only people living in the fells for miles around. Grandma’s words of warning flash into her head. You don’t know what you might find, deep in the forest …

This person’s real enough, though. A girl with dark messy hair, a pale top, dark trousers, a canvas bag slung over her shoulder.

Who is she?

Where has she come from?

What is she doing here?

The girl moves quickly and lightly through the trees with hardly a sound. When she’s in the patches of deeper shade Ettie can barely see her at all.

Is she there?

For a second, Ettie doubts herself …

She half expects the girl to transform into a deer again, like in one of Grandma’s stories.

Ettie peers through the dim, green light under the trees. There’s something else trotting ahead of the girl.

They move into a pool of sunlight. Ettie can see more clearly now.

It’s an animal with russet fur and a bushy tail.

A fox! The girl is walking with a fox! Imagine that!

Ettie follows from a safe distance, keeping herself hidden among the trees. She stops when the girl stops, but the girl never once looks back. Ettie follows on.

The girl speeds up.

Ettie loses sight of her. She comes to a crumbling wall and a fence of rusted barbed wire. This is deeper into the woods than she’s ever come before. She’s not supposed to go beyond the old boundary wall. Ettie hesitates. She should turn back.

There’s a tuft of red fur caught on the wire. That must be where the girl and the fox climbed through. Ettie takes a deep breath and clambers over the fallen stones, squeezing herself through the gap between strands of barbed wire. There! She’s done it! Crossed over the boundary.

How far ahead is the girl?

Ettie runs to catch up. In places, the girl’s boots have flattened the grasses and moss; it’s like tracking an animal. It’s exciting, finding the signs, knowing what to look for. A footprint in a patch of mud. A strand of hair caught on a low branch.

Where will it lead her?

At the top of the hill the trees thin out. In some places, the trees have been chopped down and cleared a long time ago and just the wounded stumps are left. Ettie shivers. The air is colder here. Everything’s different. It’s as if she’s crossed over into a strange new land …

There’s no sign of the girl.

The rough path becomes an old cinder track. Ettie keeps walking along it, past a tumbledown shed with a corrugated iron roof. The track carries on downhill for a few hundred metres and then along a ridge; the ground slopes away on either side. Far below, half hidden by ivy and ash saplings, there’s the dark mouth of a cave or tunnel. A pile of rusty machinery blocks the way in.

Ettie slithers down the steep bank and peers inside.

The tunnel goes right into the hillside: it’s too dark to see how far. Water drips from the roof. It stinks of damp and decay and dead things …

A shiver of fear ripples through her.

She stares into the dark tunnel.

Does she dare?

She takes one step forward … the tunnel slopes downwards. It’s pitch black …

Don’t be stupid, she tells herself. She needs a torch, and warm clothes, and boots … she can come back another day and explore it.

She scrambles back up the bank to the path. Her feet slip on loose pieces of old slate.

Ah! This must be the edge of one of the old quarries. She’s read about them in Grandma’s book on the history of the fells. The tunnel and collapsed pits are from when slate stone was hacked out of the hillside hundreds of years ago.

She carries on, past huge, ugly spoil heaps of loose and crumbling slate. Even after all this time, no moss or grass or ivy has grown over the heaps. It’s a strange, sterile place. Someone, long ago, fenced off the bigger piles with barbed wire to keep people out. Maybe the heaps are unstable and dangerous. Or maybe the fence was to stop people stealing the slate, back in the past.

This must be the old slaters’ track. In olden times they walked to work in the quarry from the stone cottages in the valley where they lived. Horses and carts carried the slate away along the same track, and then over the fells on the packhorse routes that went all the way to the coast, east and west.

Ettie imagines the noise of hundreds of picks and shovels hacking at the slate in the pits. Did the slaters laugh and sing while they worked? She thinks not. This place...