The Iron Woman (7 page)

If Primula had seen more than she ever thought
possible
, she was now in for the biggest shock of all.

‘Look, oh, look!’ she heard. Some woman cried the words. And Primula could tell, by the dreadful sound of disbelief in the voice, that something truly unthinkable was now coming. She twisted her head round. An arm was pointing. And then she saw up there, right above her – the Iron Woman.

For a moment, all the women, the cameraman, the journalists stared. Then a strange sighing gasp went up.

The Iron Woman looked awesome, so close, towering above them. And behind her, the Iron Man. Then
everybody
heard the thunderous words:

‘Stop the factory. Let the river run clean. Or all these creatures will die.’

The booming and rumbling voice seemed to go right through their bodies.

‘She’s right,’ came a voice. ‘Stop the factory.’

All these women suddenly realized there was
something
they could do. ‘Stop it now. Stop all that stuff going into the river. That’s a start!’

But then came another shout, a man’s voice:

‘It can’t be done. I cannot allow that.’ Of all the men who had worked at the factory, one was still there in his human form. The Chief Engineer.

‘You’re the very one we want,’ a woman shouted. ‘You can show us how to stop it.’

‘I cannot allow it,’ he told them. He sounded very stern. ‘We simply cannot afford –’

Women’s hands grabbed him by the throat, by the hair, by the arms. He was half carried and half dragged back into the factory. And those women didn’t waste any time. If he hadn’t told them exactly what to do, they would have torn him into ragged fragments, like a great doll.

And so, within the hour, the whole factory came to a stop. All power was turned off. Everything closed down.

‘This will cost a fortune,’ wailed the Chief Engineer. ‘Half the plant will be ruined. You can’t just switch everything off, you know, and hope for the best.’

‘Oh yes we can,’ cried those women. ‘We’ve done it.’

‘I shall have to make a detailed report –’ he began.

But before he got any further he flopped to the ground, with a huge pike’s head sticking out of his
collar
and his clothes wrapping around him like a baggy sack. His bright flat eyes jerked this way and that.

‘Into the river with him,’ came a cry. ‘Let him drink his poisons.’

And so the women carried him to the river, and slid him out of his clothes into the weltering mass of
streaming
bodies, where he vanished with a loud whack of his broad tail.

Was that the end of it? It was not. Not by a long way.

Not just all over the town, but all over the country men had turned into giant fish, giant newts, giant insect larvae, giant water creatures of some kind. Every man over eighteen years old was in water. And if their
eighteenth
birthday came on that day, down they flopped with the cake in their mouths.

Wherever the women could not get their husbands into the rivers or reservoirs or ponds, they got them into baths and swimming pools. Nearly every bath in the land had a record-sized barbel, or pike, or some other man-sized fish in it. Or a huge water flea. Here and there it was a monster leech. Mr Wells the giant catfish was now in the swimming pool at his large new home. His two little sons spent their time digging worms and dropping them in, to see him sucking them up off the blue tiles with his great blunt mouth.

The Prime Minister himself was a six-foot-long
dragonfly
larva, in the bath at Number Ten. His secretary came in every hour to tell him about the latest phone calls, but all he did was wave his feelers at her and push his strange mechanical jaws in and out. Lucy’s father was
a giant newt. Her mother had collected him from the river in the car, and now he was in the bath. He had to curve his jagged, high-crested tail slightly, to fit in. She was feeding him with cat food. That was a big problem, feeding these creatures, especially those still in the rivers.

Hogarth phoned home. His father was a shiny green frog, with a pulsing throat. He was down in the boggy rushes by the duckpond.

It was a national disaster, of course. The rest of the world was dumbfounded. The sights on their televisions were very hard to believe. At first, experts flew in from other countries to help keep things going. But the moment they stepped off their plane at the airport – down they flopped. The frogs could get back, and the
seals, and even the carp if their clothes were well soaked and the flight was not too long. But the other fish had to stay in the nearest water. So that was the end of that. The women had to manage on their own.

Very quickly, everything came to a stop. Electricity failed. So all computers went dead. All TVs went blank. Petrol ran out, the pumps at service stations no longer worked. Telephones went dead. There was no longer any question of Hogarth going home, unless he walked. All food in the shops was soon bought up, and all the candles.

Lucy’s mother was distraught. ‘What’s going to
happen
?’ she cried. ‘We can’t live on worms and rainwater. And what will happen to your poor father?’

Lucy and Hogarth felt desperate too. The whole thing had got out of hand. Soon it would be famine.
Even if other countries dropped food by parachute. The Iron Woman surely didn’t want that.

They climbed the hill, up through the wood. The Iron Woman had to help. She’d done it. Now she would have to undo it.

‘Maybe people have been taught a lesson,’ said Hogarth. ‘Maybe she’s done enough. Maybe she’ll change everybody back, now.’

But the strangest things of all were still to come.

There they were, the two familiar figures, sitting facing each other among the stones and the great cedars on the hilltop. Lucy and Hogarth told them how things were. And how everything was getting worse by the minute. How people would soon be starving to death. But the great eyes in the great faces stared down at them
without
moving. Then the Iron Woman’s voice rumbled through them.

‘They still haven’t learned,’ it said. ‘The people will have to learn. And change.’

‘Oh, they have, they really have,’ cried Lucy. ‘People are in a terrible state.’

‘I shall know when they’ve changed,’ said the Iron Woman. ‘Something will happen. A certain thing will happen.’

‘What?’ asked Hogarth. ‘How shall we know what it is?’

‘You’ll see,’ said the Iron Woman. ‘Or maybe I should say, you will hear.’

What did she mean?

And at that very moment the Iron Man raised his huge finger.

‘There it is now.’

Lucy and Hogarth listened. At first they could hear nothing. Then, without hearing anything in particular, they were hearing something. Like a shuddering in the air.

The Iron Woman got to her feet. The Iron Man stood up beside her. The two of them stood very still, gazing out over the landscape, listening.

‘Isn’t it the sea?’

Hogarth could hear it now, like a sighing groan. A groan, followed by a groan, followed by a groan. Each time louder. It was as if something were coming towards them across the country, groaning as it came. Whatever it is, thought Hogarth, it must be vast, almost like the sea.

The Iron Woman raised her right arm and pointed.

A low, webby cloud, almost like a dark mist, had spread over the land. Were the groans coming out of that cloudy mist? As they watched, the cloud seemed to be growing, thickening, bulging into lumps, like a sea of
porridge. At the same time it was like nets tangling and untangling. It covered the town and the marsh. It heaped nearer. All the time the groans, like some weary creature groaning with every breath, grew louder, and nearer.

They did not see, they could not see, what was
happening
beneath the cloud.

Lucy’s mother had just had a new shock. Every two hours or so she would go into the bathroom to have a few words with her husband. Not that he ever answered. There he lay, very black, along the bottom of the bath, perfectly still, until she tapped the bath’s edge. Then he seemed to wake up. With a slow half-wriggle he would lift himself off the bottom, and his bulging eyes would break the surface. Then he would lie, half-floating, his orange chin on the bath’s edge, gazing at her while she tried to cheer him up.

It was hard for her, looking at those cold, round, gold-ringed eyes, to think that this was Charles, her
husband
.

But this time, when she opened the door a gloomy fog billowed out in her face. It wasn’t smoke. Or at least it had no smell. It was a strangely clinging fog, like
drifting
webs. She brushed it from her face and her hand seemed to be draped with it for a moment. A peculiar clinging gloom, as dark as the smoke of burning tyres,
so she could not see the opposite wall of the bathroom. It flowed out around her, past her into the house.

Then she saw that it was rising in puffs from the bath, like a smoke signal. And now she saw the bubbles
wobbling
up from the mouth of the giant newt – or from her husband’s mouth, rather – where he lay, a jagged black shape against the white porcelain, resting lightly on his spread, rubbery fingers.

She tapped the bath, but he ignored her. About every three seconds another fat bubble wobbled up and burst in a dark puff. Like a soft, silent shellburst of those weird, untangling fibres of gloom. She rolled back her sleeve, plunged her hand into the water, and rocked him gently. He still ignored her, only letting out three big bubbles together.

Was he ill? Were these bubbles the beginning of the end? ‘Charles!’ she called. ‘Charles!’

Then she almost screamed it: ‘Charles!’

She lifted him up to the surface. It wasn’t difficult in the water. Before this, she had always been afraid to touch his bright orange, black-speckled underside, as if it might be poisonous. But she gave no thought to that now. She drew his chin over the bath’s edge. He rested there, his eyes fixed and glassy. Another bubble swelled slowly from his lips, till it popped with a tangling puff of gloom. Then, with a wriggle, he backed off and sank to the bottom. Another bubble came up.

Whatever was going on, he seemed to be
concentrating
on his bubbles.

She ran through the bedrooms, which were now dense with the strange gloom, and opened all the windows. She saw Mrs Wild, her neighbour across the street, doing the same thing, with the gloom billowing out around her from the opened windows. Mr Wild was an enormous freshwater shrimp, and he was in the bath too.

‘Is he bubbling?’ she called. ‘Charles is bubbling these funny dark bubbles.’

‘What next?’ cried Mrs Wild. ‘I think I’m going mad.’

In every home it was the same. And in the swimming pools, the water tanks, the ponds, wherever the changed men lay they were burping those bubbles. And all over the land, that dark, ropy, webby fog was rising from the mouths of these dumb creatures – like tangling smokes from countless little campfires.

It rose, forming that dark cloud, that eerie, gloomy cloud, which more and more looked like a vast net draped over the land. All day, the cloud went on thickening, while the Iron Woman and the Iron Man watched it. In the end, Lucy and Hogarth had to go home beneath it, still hearing that strange sighing groan – which seemed to come from everywhere. They sat for a long time in the bathroom, watching her father’s bubbles.

Next morning the house was clear of the gloom. Lucy’s father lay with his chin on the bath’s edge, waiting to be fed. His bubbling had stopped. And the groaning too, outside, had stopped.

But the sky was dark, as for a heavy thunderstorm. A dense, blue-blackish webby cloud lay very low over everything. The air was still, not a bird moved.

Once again, Lucy and Hogarth climbed through the woods, and came out above the cloud. The two giant figures stood exactly as they had last seen them.

‘What’s happening?’ cried Lucy as they came nearer. ‘What’s that funny cloud?’

But now they both saw that the eyes of the Iron Woman and the Iron Man were beaming red. Four
powerful
rays of red light, like laser beams, plunged down into the dark cloud spread out below.

‘Something’s going on,’ whispered Hogarth.

They heard a cry – a sob. It was as loud and vast as the groans of yesterday, but now a sob. And now as Lucy and Hogarth watched they saw a bulge lumping up in the middle of the cloud, over the town. The bulge grew rounder, as if something were pushing an immense head up through it. Then they saw it had eyes. The eyes were so big that it was not really easy to see that they were eyes at all. And there were more than two. But now they had seen them, there was no mistaking them. Vast, mournful eyes. Two huge ones, but then, on either side of them, a slightly smaller one. And two more, slightly smaller again, on either side of those four. Then two more, smaller again. Eight in all. Or was it ten?

And a mouth, a great cloudy cave of gaping mouth, slowly opened, as if it took a long breath. Then came another sob.

The cloud seemed to be one gigantic head, a
shapeless
, ragged sort of head, like a jellyfish, or like an
octopus
– spreading out into a vast, knotted tangle of cloudy legs, covering the entire landscape. Or like an immense hairy spider, whose legs spread out across its even more immense web, that lay over the land.

As they watched, the mouth opened wider. The cloud was now sobbing like a giant baby, with
wide-open
mouth – a mouth that opened wider and wider, squeezing the eyes shut. The four strong red beams from the eyes of the two iron giants plunged into the darkness of the gaping toad-like mouth of the great spider-cloud.

The sobs were now incredibly loud. The spider-face had come closer. It seemed to be resting its chin on the treetops of the wood below. Its row of eyes opened again and gazed woefully down at the two giants, and they heard:

‘Release me!’

The words were like the cloud, they filled the whole landscape yet they were blurred, smoky somehow. As if
that whole sprawling web were some kind of aerial, transmitting the sounds.

The Iron Woman’s voice seemed normal, familiar, in comparison. Yet it was like thunder.  

‘First,’ she said, ‘confess who you are.’  

The spider-cloud was silent for a while. It seemed
surprised
. It stared down at the two giants who stared up at it with their crimson beams.  

‘Confess,’ roared the Iron Man, crashing all the gears of his voice.  

‘Tell us who you are,’ thundered the Iron Woman.  

The spider-cloud seemed to rear up. Its eyes bulged. Then it bellowed:  

‘I am the spider-god of Wealth. Wealth. Wealth. The spider-god of more and more and more and more money. I catch it in my web.’  

It glared furiously down, and shook the vast web. But the four red laser beams blazed into its eyes and it blinked. It screwed up its eyes and its mouth.  

‘Now tell us who you really are,’ thundered the Iron Woman.  

The goblinish cloud snapped its wide, flat mouth. It seemed to bristle and grow even darker. Its eyes crowded close together and sheet lightnings flashed in them.  

‘I am the spider-god of Gain. The spider-god of
winning
at all costs. I catch the prize in my net.’  

And it reared up to a great height, and let out a
tremendous laugh, shaking its web like a cloak the size of the country. The thing that had been groaning so painfully and sobbing so pitifully was laughing.

‘Now you’ve got rid of your lies,’ thundered the Iron Woman, ‘confess who you really are.’

Both Lucy and Hogarth dropped to the ground. It sounded as though the world had exploded. The vast shape seemed to rear even higher and at the same time to pounce down. To his amazement, Hogarth saw a long bluish tongue flash out of the spider-cloud’s mouth, lash around the Iron Man like a whip, and vanish back into the mouth – taking the Iron Man with it.

‘Iron Man!’ cried Hogarth, as if that could help.

And in that next moment, the long tongue came flashing out again, empty, and whipped itself this time tightly round the Iron Woman.

‘Oh no!’ screamed Lucy. ‘Oh no!’

And sure enough the tongue stopped there – sticking rigidly out full length. It writhed, trying to free itself from the Iron Woman. The cloudy mouth gaped, with squirming lips. The eyes seemed to be climbing down over the great upper lip, to come to the help of the tongue. For the tongue was in trouble. It could not free itself from the Iron Woman. Her fingers were buried in it, like dreadful pincers. The tongue tried to pull itself in through the tightly closed lips, to force her off the end of it. But she was actually climbing up it, hand over
hand, dragging the tongue further out between the lips as she clawed her way up.

‘Aaaaaagh!’ a miserable wail clanged out, echoing off the far corners of the sky. And the spider-cloud reared up, twisting like a whale coming out of the sea, and crashed down on the town. It reared again and crashed again. The mouth gaped, till the eyes popped like blebs on a tyre, as the thing tried to retch. The tongue stuck out, flailing this way and that. Lucy and Hogarth watched aghast. They could see the Iron Woman was now more than halfway up the tongue, climbing slowly towards the tonsils, deep inside the black gape of that mouth, which now stretched so wide it seemed to be trying to turn itself inside out. The sounds of retching were like incessant thunder, as the gigantic dark shape flopped about the landscape. They glimpsed the Iron Woman forcing her way over the root of the tongue into the cavern of the throat. Suddenly the mouth closed and the spider-cloud slumped over the town, silent and motionless.

Lucy and Hogarth stood up. Their faces were white. Their hair stuck out in all directions as if they had been rescued from an explosion. Neither could speak. It really did look as though the Iron Woman and the Iron Man had gone.

But now the cloud was shuddering, and they heard again, just as before, sobbing. Then the Iron Woman’s
voice, muffled and echoey, came out of the depth of the cloud:

‘Confess who you are. Confess. Confess.’

With each word came a thud, that shook the hill under their feet. And at each thud, a strange, gonging boom, like a girder falling inside the hull of a ship. And at each boom, the Cloud-Spider jumped and shook, like a bag with an animal inside it.

‘It’s the Iron Woman doing her dance,’ cried Lucy. ‘Inside there. Listen.’

‘And that’s the Iron Man,’ cried Hogarth. ‘Beating his chest for a drum, keeping time.’

The Cloud-Spider’s lips were opening wide, blubbery and squirming. Big tears squeezed out between the tightly closed eyelids, rolled down, and splashed through on to the town beneath.