The Monster Maintenance Manual

by Peter Macinnis

  SIZE: Variable, depending on how much they have had to drink. A few of them are bigger than a moby duck, but you only find those ones at the bottom of very large waterfalls. (So now you know what happened to Count Henry Blenkinsop!)

  UNUSUAL THINGS: Some things that look like drain monsters have a reversed thread, but these are not for use in the other hemisphere. They are, in fact, the rare gas monster, and should never be attached to a domestic drain, because all they will do is blow bubbles.

  IS A THREAT TO: Large bodies of water, floods, torrents, rocks that want to stay wet.

  USES: Domestic applications, shipping repairs. Pool sharks like them because they get rid of deep water.

  HATES: Sinking geese, because they are hard to digest when they fall down a drain. They dislike umbrellas, raincoats and deserts because there is nothing there for them to do. They find droughts very boring.

  LIKES: Mud monsters of any sort, especially mud monsters that have been eating chocolate—which means most of them, most of the time.

  This monster is able to change its shape, depending on the container it is in, but always has a recognisable screw-thread around the top of its head, where its mouth is. If you walk on a drain monster, it feels as if you are walking on slugs, unless you are a slug. The slugs have asked me to say that walking on drain monsters feels much nicer.

  Sinking geese are not really monsters, but they are a pest that every monster owner needs to know about, if they have drain monsters in the house. Sinking geese lose most of their feathers in summer and have very heavy bodies. They are frightened of bumping their heads on low-level bridges, and so they wear crash helmets which make them top heavy. They fall over a lot, always land face first, and bend their beaks.

  When their feathers fall off, sinking geese get cold, so they like warm washing up water and hot baths. The trouble is that they are small, and they sink, so you don’t notice them in the water. When you pull the plug out, all the water sloshes down to the drain monster, and the sinking geese whiz down, right into the throat of the drain monster.

  There is nothing a hungry drain monster likes more than a goose dinner, but not if the goose is wearing a crash helmet, as sinking geese usually do. The drain monster chokes on the helmet, then coughs and splutters furiously before it loses its hold, and the sinking goose escapes. The rest of the water goes all over the floor.

  You can keep sinking geese away by having signs around your house saying ‘Danger—low level bridge’. These signs do not need to be in view, as sinking geese can sense the signs, even when they can’t see them. Leave one of the signs under your bed or at the back of a bookcase, and it will work.

  ORIGINS: Sinking geese evolved in the warm thermal lakes of Iceland, where the water is warm, but the air is freezing. Over time, they lost their feathers, so they could sink down and keep warm. When one of the warm lakes burst in an earthquake, all the ducks in that lake were washed out into the Atlantic, where they walked underwater along the mid-ocean ridges until they reached Europe and discovered warm baths and washing machines and sinks full of washing-up water. So they stayed, but later, they learned to stow away in the boilers of steamships, and then they spread around the world. These days they grow feathers each winter, and they can fly from place to place so now you can find them anywhere (except deserts).

  SIZE: Small enough to slip down most plugholes.

  UNUSUAL THINGS: You sometimes see sinking geese swimming on lakes in summer, using approved flotation devices, but there are usually many more, under the surface. When they sink, they get a lot of innocent amusement attaching old boots to fishing lines and then giving the line a quick tug.

  IS A THREAT TO: Drain monsters and badly constructed low-level bridges, if they run into them.

  USES: No known use. They are no fun as pets, and they make awful decorations.

  HATES: Low-level bridges, drains with drain monsters in them, bombats who are careless in their aiming.

  LIKES: Warm water anywhere, and they have been known to hide inside kettles in really cold weather, whistling with pleasure when they are warm enough. They also like hot spas and heated pools. When they go on holidays, they like to scuba on tropical reefs.

  This animal has a bent beak and a crash helmet. It flies very fast, and may occasionally be confused with a guided missile, but no missile has a bent beak or a crash helmet. Sinking geese do not wear socks, though morphing murphies trying to pass themselves off as sinking geese commonly make this mistake.

  A real sinking goose always has a long snorkel tube wrapped around its body, except when they are under water, when they unwrap and use those tubes to breathe.

  These are very large waterbirds, and their proper name among bird watchers is the great white rail. Moby ducks specialise in landing in swimming pools and in one splash, emptying them of water. They are also very good at sitting in empty swimming pools, wondering how to get out.

  In the last hundred years, some of the moby ducks have started breathing fire, and these clever birds have learned that if they land at an airport, sometimes a mechanic with bad eyesight will fill them up with Avgas, which they use when they breathe fire.

  Luckily for the airlines, this does not happen very often, so the ducks need to use their fuel very carefully, and this is why they hardly ever use their flames for anything except cooking their food. As the bird’s favourite food is roasted great white shark, they need a great deal of fuel to cook even one dinner.

  Moby ducks are very fussy, and would rather starve than eat shark that was not properly cooked. In fact, moby ducks are probably the third most fussy monster known to science. The most fussy monster known to science is very large, very fierce, and very fussy about being mentioned in books, so it remains nameless. The second most fussy monster is the pink elephant.

  Moby ducks are rare, which is just as well, because they all want to have a name that starts with the letters Mob-, and which have to fit their nature. They include Mobile, the most-travelled of the moby ducks, Mobster, the moby duck that makes offers you can’t refuse, Mobcap, who wears a hat full of sheep and Möbius, the moby duck that invented the Möbius strip, a runway for moby ducks to land on.

  One reason why moby ducks are rare is that troppos often trip over them when they get lost. The troppos always assume that a troop of moby ducks had set a troppo trip trap for them, so then they stomp on them.

  ORIGINS: Moby ducks are usually found in regions close to the poles. They are still very hard to see in the Antarctic, but near the North Pole, where the sea ice is melting, they are getting easier to spot.

  SIZE: Imagine a really big duck, then double it, and double it again. Keep going a few more times. That is still a bit smaller than a newly-hatched moby duckling. It gets worse after hatching, because they grow very fast.

  UNUSUAL THINGS: Nothing much, except that they are pure white, otherwise they look like any other ten-storey duck with the ability to wreck a medium-sized city with a single kick.

  IS A THREAT TO: Great white sharks, medium-sized cities (but only if the cities have been badly behaved). Quite without planning it, moby ducks are a nuisance to the troppos that trip over them. In a way, though, this makes them more of a threat to themselves.

  USES: Several have been used in tropical resorts as ski slopes, being kept in place by regular feeds of roasted great white shark.

  HATES: Being landed on or rammed by a St Bernard’s carrier pigeon. They say that each encounter with a troppo leaves them feeling a bit flat.

  LIKES: Roasted shark.

  Big, white, leaps over tall buildings with a single pound. If you are not certain if a very large white bird is a moby duck or not, you only have to give it a piece of raw shark. If it eats it, then you are looking at a disguised thunderguts. Part eaters can also pass the raw shark test, but they don’t like disguises, and they don’t like white.

  Just occasionally, you may see a large flock of seagulls flying close together. This is called mobbing, and now you can see why! Möbi
us invented the Möbius band, a marching band made up entirely of tubas, so the other moby ducks mobbed him, just to be on the safe side. Möbius went around the twist after somebody told him there were two sides to every argument.

  These monsters are famous for two things: first, pink elephants are very hard to catch, unlike grey elephants, and second, pink elephants are amazingly fussy. This fussiness comes in handy for us, because it means they are easy to annoy.

  To catch a pink elephant, you set a trap using a small fruitcake, with a cherry on top. At night, a pink elephant will follow the smell and come to eat it. The next night, you put out a slightly larger fruitcake, also with a cherry on top. After a month, the fruitcakes will be very large, and the pink elephant will be fat and waddling, but even when they are overweight, pink elephants are hard to catch, and they remain terribly fussy. Overweight grey elephants are easy to catch, but pink elephants aren’t grey, so they are still hard to catch.

  Then comes Catching Night. You put out a fruitcake that is huge, but you leave off the cherry. That night, when the pink elephant comes over to eat the fruitcake, it sees that there is no cherry, and it goes grey with rage. Pink elephants are hard to catch, but grey elephants are easy to catch. Just remember to put your new elephant on a diet until it’s back in the pink.

  Pink elephants are very shy, and only come out when they think nobody is looking, or when they smell something delicious. They hide in rose gardens, geranium pots and also among marigolds—they are not very good with colours. They also hide among invisigoths a lot of the time, but the invisigoths don’t mind, because the pink elephants can actually see the invisigoths, and don’t tread on them. When they are hiding in plants, they are very good at eating insect pests, and so they are useful to have around the house, as long as you keep your fruitcake locked up, without a Schrödinger’s Cheshire cat.

  Pink elephants are the only monsters who cannot be frightened away by playing on a drinking straw bass pipe , because they play a similar instrument themselves. In fact, if you play one of those pipes, they will probably come running to jam with you.

  ORIGINS: They were bred in Peru in the 1600s, starting with the rare Andean pygmy elephant. The breeders were trying to produce an intelligent animal that could be sent out to collect condor feathers, but the elephants could not climb trees well enough to do the collecting. The pink colour was just a chance thing, but it seems to be linked to silliness.

  SIZE: About the size of a rabbit with a problem dieting, but with very short legs, which is why they often walk around on stilts. They are surprisingly heavy for their size, and their weight makes it hard for them to climb trees.

  UNUSUAL THINGS: They have four tusks, which they use to pluck feathers from birds, and small insects from plants. They have a very large appetite for fruitcake, especially when it is made with rum. If they think they smell rum, they will come out of their hiding places to see if there is any fruitcake.

  IS A THREAT TO: Fruitcake, people guarding fruitcake, aphids, rum distilleries.

  USES: Getting rid of insect pests in plants; controlling fruitcake infestations; frightening copywrong pirates. They are good for pruning trees in a rough sort of way.

  HATES: Copywrong pirates, who always smell of rum, but never have any fruitcake. The pink elephants chase them hopefully, but they always end up feeling flat. The copywrong pirates usually also feel flat, if they are caught.

  LIKES: Fruitcake, rum, hanging out with invisigoths and discussing gardening.

  This monster is easy to spot because of its colour, its four tusks, and the feathers that it sticks to its ears using gumboot greener slime for glue. They wear the feathers as a disguise. They may be very hard to catch, but pink elephants are not very clever.

  Note: spaghetti is Italian. It is what we call a plural form of the Italian word spaghetto, just as ‘monsters’ is the plural form of ‘monster’. One monster, two or more monsters, one spaghetto, two or more spaghetti: got it?

  Some people have the silly idea that the spaghetto, which came originally from northern Italy and Switzerland grows on a plant. It is true that you find them on plants, but spaghetti are really animals that live on many different plants. They have preferences, of course, so spaghetti farmers need to plant the right trees to attract and hold the spaghetti herd until they can be harvested. On a spaghetti farm, spaghetti aren’t monsters, any more than a jersey cow is a monster in a dairy.

  Everything has a proper place. If you had a jersey cow under your bed it might be a bit more like a monster, and it is the same with spaghetti. The difference is that unlike jersey cows, spaghetti can slide under doors, and while they do no harm, they can be very noisy when they squabble and fight, so it is probably a good idea not to encourage them by putting out welcome signs or talking nicely to them. They would be less of a problem in a fish tank (bird cages won’t hold them), but nobody has ever succeeded in teaching spaghetti to do fish impressions or other tricks.

  The male spaghetto has no teeth, but it tries to tie itself in a clove hitch around the neck of a rival spaghetto, and then the two spaghetti scream at each other, making a noise like a summer cicada. In fact, recent studies have shown that about two thirds of all the cicada noise you hear in summer is really male spaghetti battling it out for space.

  There are two Scottish tribes of spaghetti, the Macaronis and the Machiavellis. Listen for the sound of bagpipes if you think they might have moved in under your bed.

  ORIGINS: Taken from the finest wild spaghetti herds and bred on farms by careful selection over 10,000 years, today’s domestic spaghetti are nothing like wild spaghetti as they were then (or as they are now). Wild spaghetti are found in most parts of the world, because juvenile forms of spaghetti were able to hide inside ropes on ships and in the harnesses of pack animals.

  SIZE: Much the same diameter as domestic spaghetti, but much longer. They have paired legs, right along the body, like a very skinny centipede that didn’t know when to stop getting longer.

  UNUSUAL THINGS: Juvenile forms have teeth, but the adult males lose their teeth, and so when feeding, they need to browse the tenderest shoots of the bushes they live on. The female spaghetti are able to eat the toughest twigs.

  IS A THREAT TO: Peace and quiet, other spaghetti. The biggest problems come when the Macaronis and the Machiavellis move into the same area, because they are sworn enemies. It all began with a simple disagreement about clothing. The Macaronis like lots of very fashionable garments. The Machiavellis believe in wearing as little as possible and are usually referred to by other monsters as the We Freeze.

  USES: When they are caught, killed and cooked, they can be put through a rumbler to remove the legs. Then they are dried and packaged, ready to eat.

  HATES: Shoelace monsters, rain and drinking straw monsters. They’re occasionally eaten by drain monsters if they try to take shelter in a drain, but as no spaghetto has ever lived to warn others about it, the spaghetti are never frightened of drains. They are instinctively frightened of any food with tomatoes in it.

  LIKES: Railway tunnels when it is raining. Male spaghetti like bean sprouts and asparagus, but their favourite meal and plaything is a bowl of jelly with earthworms in it. They love wormy jelly.

  This monster is very long and skinny, and has many, many legs that are all very short. It is probably distantly related to the millipedes.

  This is a fairly harmless monster which, like most house monsters, lives under beds. You always know when you have a shoelace monster in the house because it tangles your shoelaces each night. Never complain, or let on that you know it is there, or it will leave. You don’t want that to happen—a resident shoelace monster stops earthworms making a home under your bed and it prevents spaghetti plagues. Look under your bed: if there are no earthworms or spaghetti, you probably have a shoelace monster somewhere in there. They are very shy, so if you see one, pretend that you didn’t.

  Their food choices may seem a bit odd, until you know that shoelace monsters think ear
thworms are a very special food, and spaghetti remind them of earthworms. So why do shoelace monsters attack shoelaces? Well, shoelace monsters have bad eyesight, and so they just naturally mistake shoelaces for spaghetti, and while doing the death roll to kill the spaghetti that are really shoelaces, they tangle the laces before they realise their mistake. They don’t need to do a death roll on earthworms, because earthworms are shorter and squishier.

  Be grateful if you have a shoelace monster, because spaghetti fights are very noisy, and they can easily wake you up when the males fight to the death for ownership of the space under the bed. If you are ever fed spaghetti that tastes of cloves, you will know the pot contains free-range spaghetti, which have recently been involved in a territorial fight.

  ORIGINS: A few woolly-minded scientists think these monsters are just feral shoelaces, but it is more likely that some shoelace monsters, somewhere back in the Stone Age, lost their teeth and then had trouble surviving in the wild. These pathetic specimens moved into caves, just as the humans in the caves invented shoes. This is how they managed to find a role in which they were useful to humans, working for them as shoelaces. Just think, if there had once been better dental care for wild shoelace monsters, we would go around barefoot or in sandals today.

  SIZE: About the same size as a well fed shoelace. When it goes into its spaghetti death roll, it forms a corkscrew helix, but with a reverse (left-handed) thread. This is because shoelace monsters hate it when people try to use them as corkscrews. They are still able to use this reverse form themselves to destroy wild morphing murphies which like to eat young shoelace monsters, because they always know which way to turn.