Monster Mission

‘I didn’t expect you to knock,’ said Aunt Etta, putting down her cup. ‘One knocks at the doors of bedrooms but not of sitting rooms when one is staying in a house. But I do expect you to come in quietly like human beings, and not like hooligans.’

But the children were too frightened to be snubbed. ‘We saw a thing … a worm …’

‘As long as a train … Well, as long as a bus.’

‘All naked and white and smooth and slippery…’

‘It said “Whoo” and came at us, and its breath …’ Minette shuddered, just remembering. ‘It came out of the lake and now it’s coming after us and it’ll coil round and round us and smother us and—’

‘Unlikely,’ said Aunt Etta. She passed the children a plate of scones and told them to sit down. ‘It seems to be very difficult to get you to listen,’ she said. ‘I’m sure that all three of us have told you how unpleasant we found the whole business of kidnapping you.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Coral. ‘That loathsome matron like a camel.’

‘So it is not very likely that we would go to all that trouble to feed you to a stoorworm,’ said Etta.

Being safe in the drawing room, eating a scone with strawberry jam, made Fabio feel very much braver.

‘What is a stoorworm?’

‘A wingless dragon. An Icelandic one; very unusual. Once the world was full of them, but you know how it is. Dragons with wings and fiery breaths in the skies. Dragons without wings and poisonous breaths in the water. The wingless ones were called worms. You must have heard of them: the Lambton Worm, the Laidly Worm, the Stoorworm.’

But the children hadn’t.

‘If his breath is poisonous … he breathed on us quite hard,’ said Minette. ‘He said “Whoooo” and blew at us. Does that mean we’ll be ill or die?’

Aunt Coral shook her head. ‘He’s only poisonous to greenfly and things like that. We use him to spray the fruit trees. And he probably wasn’t saying “Whoooo”, he was saying “Who?”—meaning who are you? He talks like that; very slowly because he comes from Iceland and they have more time over there.’

But Minette was still alarmed. ‘Look,’ she said, staring through the window. ‘Oh look, he’s slithering down the hill … He’s coming closer … He’s coming here!’

Aunt Myrtle came to stand beside her. ‘He’ll be coming to visit Daddy,’ she said.

‘They’re good friends,’ explained Coral to the bewildered children. ‘They think alike about the world—you know, that the old days were better.’

Standing by the open sitting room door, they watched bravely as the stoorworm slithered into the hall, slithered up the first flight of stairs, along the landing, up the second flight… In his bedroom they could hear the Captain shouting, ‘Come along, my dear fellow, come on in,’ and the front end of the worm went through into the Captain’s bedroom while the back end was still in the hall trying to lift its tail over the table.

Fabio had stopped feeling frightened but he was becoming very suspicious. ‘Is there anything we have to do to the stoorworm?’ he asked. If the mermaids needed scrubbing and the seals had to be given a bottle four times a day, and the boobrie’s food had to be wheelbarrowed up a steep hill, it seemed likely that the stoorworm too would mean hard work.

And he was quite right. ‘It’s a question of seeing that he doesn’t get tangled up,’ said Aunt Etta. ‘In the water he’s all right but you will see a few trees we’ve stripped of lower branches—those are stoorworm trees and when he’s on land we help him to coil himself round them neatly, otherwise he gets into knots. It’s best to think of him as a kind of rope, or the flex of a Walkman.’

Fabio didn’t say anything. He had already gathered that when Aunt Etta said ‘we’ she meant him and Minette—and she went on to explain that the worm was a person who liked to think about important things like Where has yesterday gone? or Why hasn’t God made sardines without bones?

‘The trouble is he’s so long that his thoughts don’t easily get to the other end, and that upsets him,’ said Etta. ‘He wants to have an operation to make him shorter, but you must make it clear that we will not allow it. Plastic surgery,’ said Aunt Etta, fiercely tapping her nose, ‘is something we could never permit on the Island.’

‘If you’re bothered by his breath you can always give him a peppermint,’ said Coral. ‘Though why everyone in the world should smell of toothpaste is something I have never understood. And now you’d better go and fetch the barrows from the hill.’

Chapter Six

‘We must start to think seriously about running away,’ said Fabio sleepily.

‘Yes, we must,’ agreed Minette, yawning.

They had gone on saying this each night—it was almost like saying their prayers—but they hadn’t got much further. It wasn’t just that they would have to steal the Peggoty from the boathouse, they would also have to know in which direction to sail her. And of course running away has two parts to it. There is running away from somewhere and there is running away to somewhere.