The Cockatrice Boys (2 page)

Then there was silence. Hannah, walking in next minute with the dish of fish fingers, found nobody in the room.

“It was quite a shock to me,” she reported that evening on local television, “because there is no other way out of the room. So where could Mum have gone? The window was shut and locked, and the flat is thirty storeys up.”

QUEER DISAPPEARANCE OF GREAT-GRANDMOTHER, the newspapers called it.

*   *   *

Then there was the business of the Christmas tree at Chiddinglea.

The residents had, as usual, erected a twenty-metre tree in the middle of the village green and decorated it with lights, tinsel, and coloured fruit. On Christmas Eve a party was always held on the green organized by the chairman of the Tree Committee, Colonel Clandon. Carols were sung, the lights were lit, and the whole village danced hand-in-hand round the tree.

“Hey!” called the boy named Michael, pausing to stare up at the star-filled sky. “Hey, look! There's something up there!”

Three or four people heard him and gazed up likewise. They saw that the stars were being blotted out by what seemed like a huge inky cloud. From this cloud something hung down which swept in circles with a faint whistling sound. And, from the very centre of the blackness, two great pale luminous eyes glared down at the revellers. Suddenly, with a loud sucking snap, the Christmas tree was uprooted from its fastenings; it flew upwards like a pin raised by a magnet.

Gasps and yells of indignation and fright rose among the dancers.

“Hey! What's going on?” “Put back our tree!” “What kind of joke is this?”

“If it's that aerial club from Wormfleet with their helicopter—” began Colonel Clandon, but he said no more.

The carol singers at Chiddinglea, like the schoolchildren of Appleby, vanished for ever, sucked upwards into the dark like spilt sugar into a vacuum cleaner.

*   *   *

Very soon the population of the British Isles had become noticeably smaller.

Cars stood around without drivers. Houses appeared to be empty. Bus queues were very much shorter. Babies' prams had no occupants. High streets of towns were empty and silent at midday.

In five years, half the country had become a desert. Buildings had fallen, or been knocked flat. The whole of London had gone underground. People didn't dare venture out in daylight any more. Shops were hidden in cellars. Parliament sat in a dungeon under the Tower of London. Schools were held in crypts. Even the Royal Family lived in the basement, which was all that remained of Buckingham Palace.

“Things can't go on like this much longer, Harold,” said Lord Ealing, the Prime Minister, to General Grugg-Pennington, the Minister of Defence.

“No, they won't,” agreed the defence minister. “Soon there won't be anybody left at all.”

The two men were sitting on deckchairs on the Piccadilly Line, westbound, in Leicester Square tube station. Nobody else was there.

“I wonder where the monsters all come from in the first place?” mused Lord Ealing. “None of our scientists seem to agree about that. Do you suppose they can all have grown up from some nasty bacillus? Or mutated…?”

“Oh, who cares where they came from? The point is that very soon they will have the whole country to themselves. The Snarks are the worst,” said General Grugg-Pennington with a shiver.

“How can you tell? You've never seen a Snark.”

“Of course I haven't! Everybody knows that if you see a Snark you vanish.”

“I'd rather vanish than be munched up by a Flying Hammerhead.”

“Remember that football match between Ipswich and Nottingham Forest?”

“Hammerhead got the goalie just as he was going to make a beautiful save,” sighed the prime minister. “That was the last match played above ground.”

The two men sat in silence for a while. Then Lord Ealing said, “Harold, I want you to set up a Cockatrice Corps.”

People had fallen into the habit of calling
all
the creatures Cockatrices. There were too many kinds to remember their individual names: Kelpies, Telepods, Bycorns and Gorgons, Footmonsters, Brontotheres, Shovel-tuskers, Glyptodonts, Bonnacons, Cocodrills, Peridexions, Basilisks, Manticores, Hydras, Trolls, Sphynxes, and Chichivaches. And, worst of all, the deadly Mirkindole.

The country was completed infested with monsters. They had grown and multiplied, interbred and increased as fast as tadpoles in a pond.

So far as could be ascertained, the British Isles seemed to be the only territory at present affected by this disaster. Strict quarantine regulations, hastily put into effect, had up to now protected European, African, transatlantic countries, and the Antipodes.

Various attempts to end the siege of the infested islands by means of long-range missiles had proved wholly ineffective. The missiles simply melted before arriving at their targets.

The situation seemed hopeless.

“A Cockatrice Corps?” repeated the defence minister doubtfully. “But what about transport? How would they get about the country?”

“By rail.”

“Underground? I do not think that would be feasible.”

“No, we shall construct a special armour-plated train capable of running above ground.”

“But what fuel will it use?”

Stocks of oil, coal, and gas had long ago been exhausted. People had to manage without.

“The train will run on wind power. Or maybe solar energy. Or stellar energy. There's plenty of that.”

“Better than solar,” said the general. “The monsters raise too much dust by day.”

This was true. Monsters flying in swarms over the dry bare ground raised such thick clouds of dust that the sun was hardly ever seen and, even before fuel had run out, aircraft had to stop flying; the dust got into their compressor blades and the engines caught fire.

“And wind power,” said Lord Ealing. “There's plenty of that. Or diesel bricks.”

“Hmn, a wind-powered, armour-plated train. That
might
be a possibility…”

“All the old tracks are still there, so far as we know,” pointed out Lord Ealing.

“Gregory Clipspeak would be a good man to put in charge of the corps. But it would be a most dangerous mission. We'd have to call for volunteers.”

“You'd get plenty. People are fed up with living underground.”

“Very well,” said the defence minister. “I'll set up an operations room at once.”

And that was how the Cockatrice Corps came into being.

*   *   *

While the engine of the
Cockatrice Belle
was being lovingly assembled by skilled volunteers in London, the food shortage in some northern towns was becoming more and more severe.

“It's not a case of tightening belts,” said the Provost of Manchester. “It's got down to eating them.”

One November day the Hempfields District Emergency Warden took a look at his afternoon's agenda, and saw that he was due to pay a call on a Mrs. Florence Monsoon at number fifteen, Brylcreme Court. This was a melancholy, rundown council block, and number fifteen was on the fifth floor, up five flights of battered concrete stairs. Dashed over the staircase walls were various dramatic portrayals of monsters executed in spray paint, but these had been done several years before, when the monsters were still a novelty; now the pictures had faded, as had the enthusiasm for doing them, and the supply of spray paint had long since run out, and the artists had, many of them, been swallowed by the monsters so the walls beyond the third and fourth storeys were mostly undecorated. And there were no pictures at all on the corridor walls leading to Mrs. Monsoon's front door. But an inscription very low down (as if it had been done by a dwarf or a four-year-old child) read: “Mrs. F——Monsoon is an old witch.”

The warden, whose name was Mr. Mossready, shook his head at this as he lifted the metal knocker on the door and gave it a couple of sharp raps. (Electric bells in Manchester had long since ceased to function.)

After his knock there followed a long suspicious silence inside the flat, though Mr. Mossready felt fairly certain that he could hear someone moving around inside, and a woman talking in a low voice.

He rapped again.

By and by, he became aware that he was being observed through the tiny glass spy-hole by a hostile pale-grey eye.

“'Oo's that?” snapped a voice.

“The warden.”

“How do I know you're what you say? There's all sorts about these days.”

For answer he held his warden's badge up to the spy-hole and, after another extended unfriendly pause, the door was very slowly drawn open. Inside stood a thin scraggy woman with a long pale face, grey hair done in a bun on top, and a grey apron, which had once been white, tied over a lot of cardigans worn in layers, like onion skins.

“Mrs. Florence Monsoon?”

“'Oo else'd be living here?” she demanded.

“Who else
is
living here? That's what I want to know. You applied for an extra ration of carrots for your niece Sauna Blow. Where did she come from? There was no niece mentioned before, when the ration cards for meat and bread were issued.”

“She don't eat no meat nor bread. Only carrots.”

“Why?”

“That's her business, ain't it? Oh well, s'pose you best come in, don't need to have the whole building sticking their noses into my affairs,” grumbled the woman, giving a sharp glance up and down the empty corridor, as if elephants' ears extended, quivering, from every closed door.

The warden followed her through a lobby about the size of a chair seat into a very small living room. In the middle of the room was a card-table covered with a hairy brown cloth, and on top of that one of yellowed lace; round the table were crammed four chairs with red velour seats; the walls were covered by display shelves, and in each corner but one there were triangular chiffonieres; the fourth corner held a dead television set, and the rest of the space was taken up by small coffee-tables with spindly legs. On all of these stood a multitude of tiny china mugs and jugs, each with an inscription from some seaside resort: “A Present from Margate,” “A Present from Blackpool,” “A Present from Ryde.” There must have been thousands of them. It seemed that Mrs. Monsoon had been busy dusting them, for she held a piece of rag, which she now tucked into her waistband in a martyred manner. A brown-tile fireplace held a paper fan in a jam jar, and a small potted palm stood on the window-sill, blocking off any light.

Dusting all those little things must take a tremendously long time, thought Mr. Mossready, tired at the very thought. All day, most likely every day.

“Well?” snapped Mrs. Monsoon. “What nosy-parkering set of Paul Prys sent
you
along here?”

“Food Rationing and Public Security.”

“Public Security, huh! Not much of that these days.”

Mr. Mossready displayed his badge again, and drew out a long form like a scroll, which he had wrapped round a dead ballpoint pen.

But while he did so his eyes were fixed in fascinated disapproval on the girl who sat motionless at the opposite side of the card-table, with her back to the window.

The reason she couldn't move was that her hands were tied tightly with strips of rag to the back of her chair, one on each side.

Her cheeks were extremely pale. Her red hair was done neatly in two plaits. She gave Mr. Mossready a weary glance, but said nothing. She did sniff a little, though, as if she would have liked to blow her nose. The warden wondered if she had been crying, or if she had a cold.

“Are you Sauna Aslauga Blow?” he asked, consulting his form. “Daughter of Ted and Emily Blow of Newcastle-upon-Tyne?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your parents are dead, and Mrs. Florence Monsoon is your guardian?”

“Yes, sir,” she said again sadly. “That's right.”

“What relation is she to you?”

“Father's cousin,” put in Mrs. Monsoon.

“Why, might I ask, do you keep the child tied up?”

At this the girl's eyes flew nervously to the woman.

“Well! What a question!” said Mrs. Monsoon acidly. “I should have thought
any
fool could see the reason for
that.
The child's so active and restless, the very first day she was here she smashed eleven of my precious souvenirs. Naturally I wasn't having any more of that; so, since then, except at mealtimes—which she takes in the kitchen—she has to have her hands tied.”

Mr. Mossready glanced at the kitchen, which he could see from where he stood. (He had not been invited to sit down. In fact there would scarcely have been room.) The kitchen was the same size as the front hall, with sink, stove, and cupboard arranged round the sides of a standing space.

“Mrs. Monsoon, how long has the child been living with you?”

“Five years. Ever since her mum and dad was killed in an air crash in Spain. Just before the Troubles, that was.”