The Iron Woman

by Ted Hughes

‘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.

  ‘Mess,’ wailed the great face. ‘Mess.’

  ‘Who are you?’ thundered the Iron Woman from deep inside. ‘Say it again.’ And her pounding dance-steps shook the hill in time to her words, while the Cloud-Spider jerked and contorted, like a rubber comedian’s face.

  ‘I am Mess. I am Mess,’ came the sobbing wail.

  ‘And who will clean you up?’ came the Iron Woman’s voice, her words timed to her stamping dance-steps and the weird whanging boom that shook the hill. ‘Who will clean you up? Who? Who?’

  ‘Mother,’ wailed the vast snail of a mouth.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mother.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mother.’

  ‘Tell us again. Who?’

  ‘Mother will clean me up.’

  But now the Cloud-Spider was beginning to turn, as the dancing Iron Woman began to turn inside it, dragging it with her like a gown. Its wail grew agonized, higher, thinner. Its edges were being dragged towards that turning centre, like spaghetti being rolled up on a fork. As it turned it rose upwards, turning faster. Soon it was spinning, like an immense whirlpool. The Iron Woman’s revolving dance had turned into something else. Something that climbed into a spinning column. The cloudy body and webs of the giant spider were twisted tightly round it.

  ‘It’s the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon,’ cried Hogarth. ‘Going back up. It’s taking the horrible cloud with it.’

  ‘But what about the Iron Woman?’ cried Lucy.

  Sure enough, the long, swaying, whirling corkscrew of darkness was going up – just as they had seen the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon coming down. Lucy and Hogarth couldn’t take their eyes off it. The Cloud-Spider was now completely wrapped around that spinning column in tight webby folds, with a few raggy skirts of it flinging out here and there. Somewhere in there the eight eyes must be stretched out long and flat and thin like elastic. But where were the Iron Woman and the Iron Man?

  They watched the writhing column climb into the sky, with its corkscrew tip now piercing upwards, worming upwards. Huge and dark and towering, it swayed as it climbed. Growing smaller, as it climbed away. Soon it was a wispy blot, high in the blue. Then a dithering dot, like a skylark. They watched it, and watched it, till at last they were staring into nothing.

  They looked down the hill. The air was so clear, in the morning sun, the town seemed to be sparkling. The Iron Woman and the Iron Man were just coming out of the woods, climbing towards them. Lucy ran towards them. Then stopped. Hogarth joined her. The two giants stopped.

  ‘Oh!’ cried Lucy. ‘Are you all right?’ The Iron Woman was no longer a beautiful, gleaming blue-black. She was the colour of an iron fire-grate after many fires, rusty pink and grey-blue. And the Iron Man was the same. As if the inside of the Cloud-Spider had been a furnace of some kind.

  ‘Go home now,’ said the Iron Woman. ‘And watch. Wait and watch.’

  The Iron Man said nothing, just raised his great hand.

  *

  Like everybody else, Lucy’s mother had heard and watched the tremendous storm of happenings in the dark cloud. And she too had watched the spinning blur climb away into nothing. As if the whole terrific tempest had drained into the blue sky through an upward plughole. She was still standing
at the window in a daze when a voice behind her complained:

  ‘Towels, where are all the towels?’

  She turned. There was her husband, stark naked except for a skimpy hand towel, shivering and goose-pimpled from head to foot, with a seven-day beard, his hair plastered down over his brow, and a woebegone expression on his face. But, worst of all, the stubbly beard and the hair, that should have been black and curly, were now snow white.

  ‘Charlie!’ she screamed, and fainted.

  *

  So it seemed to be over. All the men climbed out of the rivers, the ponds, the swimming pools, the baths. Women ran everywhere, with bags full of clothes and towels. Slowly, life started up. Lights came on. Cars began to move. Shops opened. Telephones rang incessantly.

  But things had changed. For one thing, it was not only Lucy’s father whose hair had gone white. Every man who had been a fish, or a seal, or a water-bug, or a leech, now had white hair. Men who had been grizzled, or nearly grey, or grey, stared into their mirrors at their silvery white hair and cried: ‘Oh God, I look like Granny!’ or else ‘But my face isn’t any older, is it?’ And young men whose hair had been curly gold or glossy auburn brown or mousy hardly dared catch sight of themselves in their car mirror, or in a shop window. ‘It’s no wonder,’ they said to their wives or girlfriends. ‘What we went through was no joke. Worse than seeing a thousand ghosts! You’d have gone white too.’ Within days, hairdressers and chemists were out of hair dye.

  But other things had changed for the better. Everybody realized straightaway that the terrible scream no longer blasted them when they touched each other. Instead they now heard it all the time, but only faintly – like a ringing in the ears. And strangely enough, it came and went.

  It was easy to see what made it come. When you looked at the waste bin, it came noticeably stronger. And when you poured soap powder into the washing machine, it seemed to zoom in on you and go past very close, like a jet going over the house – but a jet powered with those screams. It was a bit of a shock. And when Mr Wells, with his little white moustache, looked at his stacked drums of toxic waste, it came nearly full strength, a painful screech in his ears, like something coming straight at him, and he had to look away quickly.

  So nobody could forget. Farmers stood in their fields, listening and thinking. Factory owners sat in their offices, listening and thinking. The Prime Minister sat with his Cabinet Ministers, listening and thinking – and whoever spoke, the others looked at the speaker’s weirdly white hair and listened more carefully, and thought more deeply.

  They had all learned a frightening lesson. But what could they do about it?

  They soon found out.

  *

  Already, next morning, an odd thing was noticed. The first men back to work at Chicago saw a yellow net, like a massive spider’s web, draped thickly over the stacks of drums full of poisonous chemicals. Each strand was the thickness of a pencil, and brittle, so it broke up into short lengths. It was a mystery.

  The same webs were draped over all the waste dumps in the country. Over all the rubbish heaps. Over all the lagoons of cattle slurry. The same stuff.

  Chemists were baffled by it when they tried to find out what it was. But pretty soon they found what it was good for. It was the perfect fuel. Dissolved in water, it would do everything that oil and petrol would do, yet fish could live in it. It would burn in a fireplace with a grand flame but no fumes of any kind. And that first morning there were thousands of tons of it.

  Next morning, the same. And now everybody could see that the rubbish and the poisonous waste were being mysteriously changed into these yellow webs during the night.

  Even if you had a little rubbish heap in your back garden, you would have a web on it next morning. Or a web where it had been. Then you could dissolve it in water and run your car on it for a while.

  Strange!

  People soon realized what was happening. At nightfall, a mist gathered over any rubbish, wherever it might be. A dark, webby, smoky mist. Just like the clouds of puff that had bubbled from those suffering men when they were fish and newts and frogs. And next morning there was the yellow web – and the rubbish had gone. Or most of it had. Another night and it would be all gone. As if the mist had eaten the rubbish and left a web.

  No wonder they called it a miracle. It happened in no other country.

  But wherever the rubbish or the waste leaked into a stream or a pond, the mist would not form. Once that leak was stopped, sure enough next night the webs would come. So everybody stopped those leaks because everybody wanted the magic fuel.

  Mr Wells didn’t have to scratch his bald head for long. He blocked all those outlets into the river and simply stacked the waste – where it soon turned into yellow webs. Then each day his men harvested the yellow webs. Now he could import waste from all over the world. The more the better. All his suppliers had to pay him to take it, of course. Then he sold the yellow webs. Soon he could triple all his wages.

  And soon, too, they found it was better than manure. Or, treated this way, it would kill Colorado beetles and nothing else. Treated that way, it would keep out thistles. It could be made to do anything.

  Of course, nobody knew what had really happened. ‘A miracle!’ they said, shaking their heads. ‘Truly.’

  ‘Our problems,’ said the Prime Minister, ‘seem to be strangely solved.’

  *

  Hogarth had to go home. On that last morning, he and Lucy climbed the hill together. It was the third day of the webs. Everybody was still baffled by these strange, brittle, yellow nets. Lucy and Hogarth were no wiser than anybody else. But they knew it had to do with that terrific fight, when the Iron Woman had clawed her way down the Cloud-Spider’s throat and fought it from the inside with her dreadful dance and the star power of the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon. Something to do with the way the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon had whirled it into a spinning blur, and taken it upwards.

  There were the Iron Woman and the Iron Man, sitting on the hilltop stones, among the cedars. The Iron Man had brought up the birdwatcher’s car out of the marsh. He was folding pieces of it into handy shapes. They seemed to be having a picnic together. Every trace of their scorching and burns had disappeared. In fact they seemed brighter than ever. The Iron Woman’s blue-black looked new-made. Lucy wondered if they had been polishing each other. She and Hogarth sat on the grass near by, gazing at them.

  ‘Iron Man, can I ask you something?’ said Hogarth after a while.

  The Iron Man swivelled his head slightly and stopped chewing, to show he was listening.

  ‘Where are the yellow webs from?’ asked Hogarth.

  The Iron Man started to chew again. He seemed to be looking at the Iron Woman. Minutes passed. Finally the Iron Woman spoke.

  ‘Where from?’ she said. And paused.

  She went on chewing a while. She was bent over something in her lap, that she worked at carefully. Then her voice came again, rumbling somehow from beneath them, or echoing somehow from all around them. ‘Where,’ she asked, ‘did the Cloud-Spider come from?’

  ‘The bubbles!’ cried Lucy. How could she forget those bubbles.

  The Iron Woman chewed. She seemed not to have heard, as she worked at whatever it was in her lap. Then her voice came again: ‘And the bubbles? Where did they come from?’

  Both Lucy and Hogarth were thinking the same thing. Obviously the bubbles had come from – well, from inside Lucy’s father, for one. When he was a giant newt. And from inside Hogarth’s father when he was a giant frog. And from inside all the other men.

  Lucy frowned. Was the Iron Woman saying that the yellow webs, or whatever was making the yellow webs, was the same thing that made the bubbles? Inside her father? And inside the others? Somehow? How could that be? But the Iron Woman’s voice was rumbling again.

  ‘Big, deep fright,’ she said. ‘Big, deep change.’

  Lucy thought about her father’s hair. That was big change, all right. But still, it was only hair. Whatever had
made those bubbles – that’s where the change must be. That was deep. But what was it? And how could it …? Lucy and Hogarth were lost in their thoughts, as they gazed up at the huge, mysterious faces.

  Then the Iron Woman reached out and laid over Lucy’s shoulders a heavy, cool necklace made of flowers from every month in the year. Later, when Lucy counted them, there were fifty-two different kinds of flowers. The giant hands came out again and laid another flower necklace, exactly the same, over Hogarth’s shoulders. Then she lifted both her hands and laid another flower necklace, very much bigger, very thick and heavy, made entirely of foxgloves, round the neck of the Iron Man. Finally, she put one over her own head, and arranged it across her breast. This one, Lucy saw, was made entirely of snowdrops.

  The four of them sat there, in the warm, morning sun, not saying anything. Lucy and Hogarth simply watched the huge faces of their strange friends, and listened to the faint sound in their ears. This sound, they now noticed, seemed to have become stronger and different. It was not the faint sound of the creatures crying. It was music of a kind, from far off, far up. They both looked up into the blue, gazing and listening. It was not a skylark.

  About the Author

  Ted Hughes was born in Yorkshire in 1930. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published by Faber in 1957, and was followed by many volumes of poetry and prose for both children and adults. He was Poet Laureate from 1984 and was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1998, the year in which he died.

  By the Same Author

  for children

  How The Whale Became

  Meet My Folks!

  The Earth-owl and Other Moon People

  Nessie, the Mannerless Monster

  The Coming of the Kings

  The Iron Man

  Moon-Whales

  Season Songs

  Under the North Star

  What is the Truth?

  Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth

  Tales of the Early World