The Iron Woman (3 page)

‘I am Iron Woman.’

‘Iron Woman!’ whispered Lucy, staring at her again.

‘And you are wondering why I have come,’ the voice went on.

Lucy nodded.

‘Because of this!’ The voice was suddenly louder, and angry. Lucy winced, as the eyes opened even wider, larger, glaring at her.

‘What? Because of what?’ Lucy had no idea.

‘Listen,’ rumbled the voice.

Lucy listened. By now, the whole land, inside the
circle
of the horizon, was simmering and bubbling with birdsong, like a great pan.

‘The birds?’ she asked. ‘I can hear –’

‘No!’ And the black eyes flashed. A red light pulsed in their depths. Lucy felt suddenly afraid. What did she mean?

‘Listen – listen –’ The rumbling voice almost cracked into a kind of yell. A great hand had come out now and folded round Lucy’s shoulders, just as her father would put his arm around her, while the other hand, with that colossal finger and thumb, just as daintily as it had held the snowdrops, took hold of her hand and gripped it, softly but firmly.

Lucy’s fright lasted only for a second. Then she was overwhelmed by what she heard. A weird, horrible sound. A roar of cries. Thousands, millions of cries – wailings, groans, screams. She closed her eyes and put her free hand over her ear. But it made no difference. The dreadful sound seemed to pound her body, as if she were standing under a waterfall of it, as if it might
batter 
her off her feet. Or as if she were standing in a
railway
tunnel, and the express train was rushing towards her, an express of screaming voices –

Finally, she could stand it no longer and she actually screamed herself. She opened her eyes, trying to drag her hand free and to twist free of the hand enclosing her shoulders. But the thumb and finger held her too tightly, and the enfolding hand gripped her too firmly. And all the time the immense black eyes, so round and so fixed, stared at her. And even though her own eyes were wide open that horrible mass of screams, yells, wails, groans came hurtling closer and closer, louder and louder – till she knew that in the next moment it would hit her like that express train and sweep her away.

But at that moment, the fingers and the hand let her go, and the sound stopped. As if a switch had switched it off.

Lucy stood panting with fear. She almost started to run – anywhere away from where she had been
standing
. But the great eyes, now half-closed, had become gentle again.

‘Oh, what was it?’ cried Lucy. ‘Oh, it was awful!’ She felt herself trembling and knew she might burst into tears. Her ears were still ringing.

‘What you heard,’ said the voice, ‘is what I am
hearing
all the time.’

‘But what is it?’ cried Lucy again.

‘That,’ said the voice, ‘is the cry of the marsh. It is the cry of the insects, the leeches, the worms, the shrimps, the water skeeters, the beetles, the bream, the perch, the carp, the pike, the eels.’

‘They’re crying,’ whispered Lucy.

‘The cry of the ditches and the ponds,’ the voice went on. ‘Of the frogs, the toads, the newts. The cry of the rivers and the lakes. Of all the creatures under the water, on top of the water, and all that go between. The
waterbirds
, the water voles, the water shrews, the otters. Did you hear what they were crying?’

Lucy was utterly amazed. She saw, in her mind’s eye, all those millions of creatures, all the creepy-crawlies, clinging to stones and weeds under the water, with their mouths wide, all screeching. And the fish – she could see the dense processions of shuddering, flashing buckles and brooches, the millions of gold-ringed eyes, with their pouting lips stretched wide – screeching. And the frogs that have no lips – screaming. She suddenly remembered how the giant woman had rubbed her eyes in pain, and she thought of the wet frogs, just as wet and naked as eyeballs, burning – rubbing their eyes with their rubbery almost human fingers. And the eels – that eel. Now she knew. That eel’s silent writhings had been a screaming.

‘What’s happening?’ she cried.

The Iron Woman raised her right arm and pointed at
the river with her index finger. The ringing in Lucy’s ears now seemed to be coming out of the end of that
finger
. She looked towards where the finger was pointing. The river rolled and swirled, just as before. But now it seemed that a hole had appeared in it, a fiery hole, and she could see something moving far down in the hole.

It was the eel again. Just as she had seen it before, there it was, writhing and knotting and unknotting itself. But it was coming towards her, just as if the fiery hole were a tunnel. It came dancing and contorting itself up the bright, fiery tunnel. Now it was very close to them, in the mouth of the strange hole. She heard a
crying
, and knew it was the eel. And there were words in the crying. She could almost make them out, but not quite. She strained to hear the words coming from the eel that seemed to be twisting and burning in a kind of fiery furnace. And it did seem to be burning. In front of her eyes it blazed and charred, becoming a smoky, dim shape, a spinning wisp. Then the hole was empty.

But already another form had appeared far down in the fiery hole, coming towards them in a writhing dance.

It was a barbel. It danced as if it walked the water on its vibrating tail, swaying and twisting to keep its
balance
. Lucy could see the little tentacles of its beard
lashing
around its mouth as it jerked and spun in the fiery hole. And the barbel too was crying. It seemed to be
shouting, or rather yelling, the same thing over and over. But still Lucy could not make out the words. And again, as she strained to catch the words, the barbel writhed into a twist of smoke and vanished, just as the eel had done. But already, far down inside the hole, she could see the next creature. And this time it was an otter.

Just like the others, the otter came twisting and
tumbling
towards them, up the fiery tunnel, in a writhing sort of dance, as if it were trying to escape from itself. And as it came it was crying something, just like the eel and the barbel. Again, Lucy could almost hear the words, louder and louder as it danced nearer and nearer, till it spun into a blot of smoke at the hole mouth and vanished.

After that came a kingfisher. This dazzling little bird came whirling and crying till it fluttered itself into a blaze of smoke like a firework spinning on a nail.

After that came a frog. The frog’s dance was simply a leaping up and a falling down on its back. Then it scrambled to its feet, leapt up and fell on its back, over and over, as if it were inside some kind of spinning fiery bubble, inside the fiery hole. But its voice came loud and clear, a wailing cry like the same words shouted again and again. But Lucy still could not make out what words those were, till the frog too whirled into smoke.

Then came a squirming thing that Lucy could not make out. Then with a shock she recognized it. It was a
human baby. It looked like a fat pink newt, jerking and flailing inside a fiery bubble. But just like those other creatures it came up the fiery tunnel, doing its dance, which was like a fighting to kick and claw its way out of the fiery bubble. This time the crying was not like words. It was simply crying – the wailing, desperate cry of a human baby when it cries as if the world had ended.

Lucy could not bear to see any more. She knew this baby, too, would suddenly burst into flames, blaze into a whirl of smoke and vanish. She dropped her face into her hands. Her shoulders shook as she sobbed.

As she got control of herself, she suddenly thought: This is my nightmare. I’m back in it. If I make a big effort, I’ll wake up and everything will be all right. And she looked up.

But if she had hoped to see her attic bedroom with the case of five stuffed owls, it was no good. There in front of her eyes were the black columns of the legs of the Iron Woman. And there was the cold river. And she could feel that strangeness in her ears, that ringing, but fainter now, with the singing of the birds breaking through.

The Iron Woman was gazing out through the trees. ‘What’s happened?’ cried Lucy. ‘Oh, what’s wrong with everything?’

The rumbling voice shook the air softly all around her. ‘Them,’ she heard, in a low thunder. ‘Them. Them.
They have done it. And I have come to destroy them.’

The great black eyes stared at Lucy – black and yet also red, with a dull glow. Then the voice came again, louder, like a distant explosion: ‘Destroy them!’

And again, still louder, so the air or her ears or her whole head seemed to split. Her whole body cringed, as if a jet fighter had suddenly roared down out of nowhere ten feet above the tree tops:

‘Destroy them!’

Who? Lucy was wondering wildly. Who does she mean? Who are ‘them’? And she would have asked, but the Iron Woman had lifted a foot high above the ground and for a frightful moment Lucy thought this huge,
terrible
being had gone mad, like a mad elephant, and was going to stamp her flat. Then the foot came down hard, and the river bank jumped. The Iron Woman raised her other foot. She raised her arms. Her giant fists clenched and unclenched. Her foot came down and the ground leaped. Her eyes now glared bright red, like traffic lights at danger.

Slowly, the vast shape began to dance, there on the river bank. Lifting one great foot and slamming it down. Lifting the other great foot. She began to circle slowly. Her stamping sounded like deep slow drumbeats,
echoing
through her iron body. But as she danced, she sang, in that awful voice, as if Lucy were dangling from the tail of a jet fighter just behind the jets:

She wasn’t singing so much as roaring and groaning. She seemed to have forgotten Lucy. It was an incredible sight. The size of several big elephants rolled into one, and now working herself up, every second more and more enraged. And Lucy was thinking: She must mean the Waste Factory. People are always worrying about how the Waste Factory poisons everything. She’ll
trample
the whole thing flat. Nothing can stop her.

Lucy’s father worked at the Waste Factory. Everybody worked at the Waste Factory. Only the month before, the Waste Factory had doubled its size. It was importing waste now from all over the world. It was booming. Her father had just had another rise in wages.

At the same time, she thought of the million screams of all the water creatures, and even that human baby, inside the Iron Woman’s body. No wonder she was
roaring
and writhing in that awful dance. All the creatures were screaming inside her, and the sound came out of
her mouth as this terrible roar. Everybody within miles must be hearing it. And maybe the Iron Woman truly was going mad in front of her eyes, with the torments of all those burning, twisting, screaming water creatures inside her.

Then Lucy swayed on her feet, the darkness came rushing in from all sides, and she dropped in a faint. And she lay there unconscious, as the earth beneath her jolted and quivered.

When Lucy came round, the Iron Woman had
vanished
. But the deep giant footprints were there. And when she reached home, there was the hosepipe, still squirting over the drive-way. As she turned it off, she saw the foxglove. She picked up the foxglove.

Stealthily opening the front door, she could hear her father and mother in the kitchen. She managed to slip up to her attic unseen. Her light was on and her window still open. And there were the snowdrops.

First, she put the snowdrops in a little cup, with water. Next, she put the foxglove in a tall, thin, glass jar, with water. Then she sat on her bed.

What ought she to do? Was this Iron Woman
anything
like the Iron Man? Lucy had saved a page from a newspaper, with a picture of Hogarth, the boy who was
the Iron Man’s friend. It told the name of the farm he lived in and the name of the town nearby. She wrote him a letter. In this letter she described everything about the Iron Woman. Three pages. She began it: ‘You are the Iron Man expert and I need your help.’ And she ended it: ‘Please come quickly or the Iron Woman will smash up the factory where my dad works and kill all the people.’

She sellotaped one of the snowdrops to the letter, just beside her signature, and drew a ring round it, with an arrow pointing to the word proof. Then she added: ‘PS You can camp in our orchard. People do. Say you want to birdwatch in the marsh like lots of people.’

After posting this letter, she started searching for the Iron Woman. Maybe if she knows my father works at the Waste Factory, she thought, she will think again. Or maybe she’ll smash it up only after he’s come home. After all, I’m her friend. She came to me to be washed. I showed her the river. She showed me the creatures
crying
. But though Lucy searched for most of that day, she found no trace of the Iron Woman.

She went back again to the river, to look again at those footprints. Their size and depth frightened her more than ever. She thought they might lead
somewhere
, but they didn’t. The Iron Woman must have gone up or down the river, wading in the water, when she left Lucy. Upriver, she would come to the Waste
Factory. But she might have gone downriver, back into the marsh or the sea.

That evening, Lucy was relieved when her father got home. Ought she to tell him everything? Then maybe he could warn the factory somehow. By the time she went to bed she had a splitting headache. But still she hadn’t mentioned the Iron Woman. She knew she should, but somehow she couldn’t. Her mother and father would never believe her. She just knew they wouldn’t. They would ask her endless questions. They would think something was wrong with her. They might even want to take her to the doctor.

She hardly slept. She knew she was waiting. She lay there, listening, hearing every slightest sound. She had left her window slightly open, so she would hear better. She kept remembering the creatures and their cry, and that dreadful dance. Gradually, as she thought about it all, she became more and more frightened. Perhaps the Iron Woman really was insane. What did she mean, ‘Destroy’? The night hours passed slowly.

The lark began to sing, climbing up through the darkness. As soon as it’s light, thought Lucy, I’ll start searching again. And with that thought she fell asleep and began to dream.

Just as before, somebody was coming up the attic stair, but this time in a hurry. The door banged open. Once again that strange girl with the oil-slick slime all
over her face and hair and arms, was bending over her, with her great black eyes, shaking her shoulder and shouting: ‘Quickly. Quickly. Now. Come with me.’

And in her dream, Lucy jumped out of bed.

Immediately the two of them were standing on the marsh road. It was dawn. The red sun hung there, over the marsh, much bigger than the real sun. For some reason, the road was covered with eels, and Lucy thought: Something has frightened them out of the marsh. When she bent to look at one, it stared up at her with human eyes, large, black and shining, like the girl’s. She noticed that her own feet were bare, but at that moment the girl grabbed her arm. Lucy looked up. The girl was pointing.  

The Iron Woman was rising out of the marsh, beneath the red sun. She reared to her full height,
blocking
the sun with her black shape. She climbed out on to the road, streaming with slime, and strode away towards the town.

Now Lucy knew what was going to happen. But the Iron Woman was already there and Lucy was too late. She looked around for the girl, but suddenly a mob of screaming women were running past her. The Waste Factory was exploding like a vast bonfire made of
firebombs
. Huge tangles of pipes soared into the air, roofs rose like wings, buckled and collapsed, in a glare of shooting red flames and blizzards of sparks. The Iron
Woman stood in the middle of it, simply tearing the
factory
buildings out of the ground. She hurled the
fragments
in all directions, like a madwoman in a strawberry patch ripping up the plants. Lucy stood alone, in her nightdress, her feet bare, knocked and shoved by the stampeding crowd of terrified women.

And now she could see that the Iron Woman herself was on fire. But that didn’t stop her one bit. In fact she seemed to enjoy it. She had begun to dance her
frightening
dance, snatching up girder towers and tossing them aside, kicking gantries into the air, her great black body outlined in her own flames. She was like a giant Guy Fawkes, kicking and trampling and scattering his own bonfire while he blazed.

Now Lucy saw a massive chunk of steel catwalk hurtling towards her through the air. She seemed to have plenty of time to examine it, as it grew larger and larger. Tiny figures of men were clinging to it. She tried to see if one of them was her father. And yes – there he was. She could see him clearly, embracing a girder, his head twisted and staring down at her in amazement as he fell towards her.

She woke with a cry and scrambled out of bed as if that jagged mass of steel rails and girders with its cargo of clinging men might crash on to her pillow. She stood by the window, shaking. She had never had such a nightmare. She hardly dared close her eyes in case the
whole thing might still be going on inside there, behind her eyelids.

The morning was perfectly still. She could hear the lark, faint and far up. The window square was dark blue. On the windowsill, just inside the curtain, side by side, the two snowdrops dangled their heads over the edge of the little cup, still fast asleep.

Ever since the Iron Man had made Hogarth so famous, all kinds of people sent him letters. But this was the
strangest yet. He sat on his bed re-reading it, and
looking
at the snowdrop.

He’d often wondered if the Iron Man had any
relatives
, somewhere. They’d be hidden away, of course. Quite likely in some deep mudhole. Or in the sea. Or inside the earth. After all, the Iron Man had come from somewhere. Why shouldn’t there be others?

What puzzled Hogarth was all this about the crying of the creatures, the uproar of screeches coming through the Iron Woman’s hand when she touched you. It sounded like electrical voltage. It sounded dangerous. And the Iron Woman herself sounded dangerous. That dance. And that mad song ‘Destroy’.

Yes, he had to go. After all, he was the expert Iron Giant handler. Besides, what would the Iron Man make of it? Sometimes, Hogarth thought, the Iron Man seemed a bit lonely. But first, he’d better go and see.

In the holidays it was easy to get away from home for a few days. Those marshes were famous for birds, and Hogarth had been given a pair of binoculars for Christmas. His father wanted some help repairing fences, but then said there wasn’t much that needed doing, he could do it himself. His mother drove Hogarth to the station with his packed sandwiches and his tent. By five that afternoon he had pitched the tent in the small orchard behind Lucy’s house. Lucy herself showed him just where. Her mother gave him a cup of
tea and Lucy offered to show him the ways into the marsh, where the meres of open water were.

Instead, she took him to the river and showed him the footprints. He saw at once they were the real thing. The toes were new. The Iron Man did not have separate toes. Hogarth kept asking: ‘How high is she to the knee? How thick is her arm? Compared to your body. How big is her hand?’

It seemed the Iron Woman was just about the same size as the Iron Man. But where was she? The Iron Man liked to stand among trees. Behind the town, where the land rose into rolling low hills, Hogarth could see some woods. Lucy had not yet searched in those woods. They set off.

On the way, they passed the wreckage of the car, in the marsh, and stopped to look at it. Already it was beginning to rust. Hogarth wanted to get out to it, to inspect it. He stepped from clump to clump of reeds.

‘Be careful,’ cried Lucy. ‘It can be deep if you go in.’

‘See the holes.’ Hogarth pointed from where he was. Lucy saw a row of three jagged holes across the twisted bonnet and wing.

‘Her finger holes,’ said Hogarth. ‘Where she grabbed it.’

Coming back, he made a long stride to a reed clump that collapsed under his foot. With a floundering splash he managed to keep his balance, but he was in over his knees and sinking fast. He lurched another stride or two
and was stuck, sinking again. Lucy jumped down the bank and just managed to catch his reaching hand.

But as she began to heave him towards safety they both froze and stared at each other.

‘Can you hear it?’ she cried. ‘That’s it.’

Hogarth’s mouth opened. He was sinking slowly, but he could not believe his ears. He looked as though he had seen an amazing thing in the sky behind Lucy’s head. And she shouted again, above the deafening roar in her own ears:

‘That’s it. That’s their noise. That’s the creatures.’

Hogarth made another wild lunge, scrambled up the grassy bank and let go of her. The moment their hands parted the sounds stopped.

Hogarth was panting, as if he’d run across a field. He looked around wildly, every way.

‘Was that it? I heard them all. I could hear them all. I seemed to see things.’

‘Isn’t it horrible?’ cried Lucy. ‘Are your ears ringing?’

Hogarth nodded. His eyes were wide open, as if they had no lids. Looking at him, Lucy felt even more
frightened
. Perhaps it was all far more dreadful than she had thought. Far, far more dreadful.

Suddenly he glared at her fiercely and grabbed her hand. Lucy squeezed her eyes shut as the sound came again – exactly as if it had been switched on like a
glaring
light full in her eyes. Or like an amplifier full blast
into her earphones. It actually seemed to hurt her, like a whacking blow all over her body at the same moment.

He let go of her hand and the sound stopped.

‘It’s when we touch, don’t you see?’ he cried. ‘It’s when we touch.’

Lucy felt bewildered. She was too frightened to think. Hogarth’s excitement was frightening. As if the sounds, the screams of all the creatures, weren’t bad enough. Hogarth somehow made it worse.

And then again, without warning her, he clasped her wrist again, with his right hand. And again they stared at each other as the shattering din, the howls, the screeches, the wailings, the groans and screams engulfed them. Then they jumped apart, ears ringing.

‘Is it in me? Or is it in both of us?’ Lucy almost shouted. ‘What’s happening? We have to find her.’

They set off again. Maybe the Iron Woman could explain what it all meant. Hogarth did not know what to do with his excitement.

‘It’s contagious!’ he cried. ‘You’ve caught it off the Iron Woman. Now I’ve caught it off you. And if I grab somebody, they’ll hear it too. And then if they grab somebody they’ll hear it too. And on and on. Just think!’

Lucy didn’t dare to think. What was it going to be like when her father touched her, and her mother?

They hurried on towards the woods.

They searched all along the bottom fringe of the woods, but there was no sign of her having gone in, no great footprints.

‘Maybe she’s just not here any more,’ said Lucy. ‘Maybe she just came and now she’s just gone. Maybe she wasn’t real somehow.’

They looked out across the town towards the marsh and the strip of sea, dark in the evening. Hogarth could feel the disappointment creeping up on him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘She was real.’

‘But if she’s gone,’ said Lucy, ‘she might just as well not have been.’

Hogarth caught her hand.

Anybody looking at them would have seen nothing but a boy and a girl holding hands under the woodside. But to them it was as if they were trapped in a tunnel flattened against the wall, while an express train went past within inches of their faces.

And now Hogarth saw things quite clearly, as Lucy did. In every cry of the terrific roaring blast it seemed to him that he could see a wild face, a mouth stretched wide, a body hunched up. Even though he was simply gazing at the far edge of the sea, it was as if he were
looking
through the earth, and seeing it crammed full of every possible kind of creature – all screaming, wailing with all their might, where the tiniest shrimp sounded like a mad elephant and sticklebacks sounded like
trapped tigers and slim black leeches like bellowing
alligators
.