Monster Mission

It was because of Herbert that Myrtle understood more quickly than the other aunts how near the kraken was. She had tried to play Herbert one of his favourite pieces—a minuet by Mozart. Usually he listened to this with his eyes closed, absolutely enchanted; Mozart was his favourite composer. But now he was restless, eagerly looking out to sea, and then he shook his head once as if to excuse himself and dived into the waves.

Soon it wasn’t only Myrtle who guessed. Aunt Etta saw three snow geese—birds she had never seen on the Island before—and Coral came back from a shell hunt, dancing with excitement.

‘The sea is changing colour,’ she said. ‘Only slightly, but it’s changing.’

Then suddenly it seemed as though everyone knew that the time was coming and the last-minute preparations began.

In his bed, the old Captain sat with the telescope glued to his eyes and tried to be gloomy.

‘Of course he won’t be like the kraken was in the olden days. He’ll be smaller, like the seals are smaller and the sheep, and the bosoms of the ladies. Maybe he won’t be any bigger than a whale,’ said Captain Harper. But if anyone tried to take the telescope away from him he became absolutely furious and, as the kraken came closer, he scarcely slept.

As for the aunts and the children, during those days they seemed to be welded together into one band of workers who thought of nothing except to make the best possible welcome for the kraken when he came. It was impossible to imagine that Fabio and Minette had been drugged and kidnapped against their will not three weeks before. There was no need to give them orders; they knew what needed doing almost as soon as the aunts and they, like the aunts, never spared themselves.

Then one day they too heard the Hum once more. It was the kraken’s Daily Hum, his Working Hum, the Hum with which he cleaned and healed the sea, and it was getting closer, and closer …

There was only one thing which puzzled the aunts. Every so often the Hum stopped and they heard a low rumbling which might have been the kraken speaking. They couldn’t understand the words from that great distance—and in any case none of the aunts spoke Polar—but they could understand the tone, and the feeling they had was that whoever the kraken was talking to was driving him a little mad.

But who could it be? The kraken had always been a loner.

They were soon to find out.

Chapter Eleven

The Great London Aunt Hunt was still going badly. The pictures of Etta and Coral and Myrtle went on flapping on the walls of police stations everywhere but the people who came to say they had seen one or other of them were obviously barmy. A man came and said a lollipop lady who was helping schoolchildren across the road in Kensington had a moustache and was certainly Aunt Etta, but she wasn’t. Another man said he had seen Aunt Myrtle busking outside a cinema, but he hadn’t. And anyone weighing over a hundred kilos and wearing jewellery was apt to be hauled off by the police in case she was Coral.

‘Don’t call me “aunt”,’ terrified women were begging their nephews and nieces all over London’s streets and, by the time the children had been gone three weeks, the word had almost disappeared.

Minette’s mother, as the days passed with no news, smoked three packets of cigarettes a day, couldn’t sleep without slurping a full tumbler of whisky and allowed her flat to get into even more of a mess than before. Of course in some ways it was easier without Minette who kept trying to tidy up and open windows. All the same, Mrs Danby couldn’t help wishing she had let her have a nightlight.

‘And I should have taken her to the seaside—she always wanted to go,’ she said to her latest boyfriend.

‘You can take her when she comes back,’ he said, dropping his empty lager can over the side of the sofa. ‘Though I’ve never seen much point to the seaside myself. The water comes in, the water goes out—what’s the sense in that?’

Professor Danby too wished he had done some things and hadn’t done others. He had promised every time she came to take Minette to the ice rink and there’d never been time, and he’d known really that she didn’t want an encyclopaedia without pictures for her birthday.

But when they telephoned each other for news of Minette, the Danbys quarrelled as much as ever. They had decided that she had run away, and of course they blamed each other.

‘I’m surprised she lasted so long in that pigsty you live in,’ the professor said.

‘Well, really,’ Mrs Danby would reply. ‘Considering that your place would make an underground tomb on a rainy Sunday look like Disneyland, you’ve got a nerve!’