SIZE: About the size of a large fruitbat, although they seem smaller when they ‘freeze’.
UNUSUAL THINGS: Cricket bats are found in many schools. Since they helped rid the world of Count Henry Blenkinsop, they have been recognised as good friends to all humans. The more traditional cricket bats use no first names, but they always have two initials in front of their main name.
IS A THREAT TO: Evil counts, bad bats and sloppy bowling. They also dislike film critics, because the films they appear in always get bad reviews. Nobody ever erected a statue to a critic, they say. Sadly, nobody has ever erected a statue to a cricket bat, either.
USES: They can be used to hit annoying monsters like pudding monsters, or to send puddings back when the pudding monsters throw puddings at them.
HATES: Cricket bats hate the smell of garlic, which is probably why pudding monsters eat so much of it.
LIKES: Being taken out to play.
This animal often has things written on its pale body, and it wears a red sock on its single leg. It usually stands on its head as a form of disguise. When they are in the wild, they usually burrow into old and rotted tree stumps known as cricket stumps.
Most of the breeds of this monster do not have separate names, and they certainly have no manners, but they come in many varieties. Small horned monsters have noisy hoofs that they clatter around on. They especially like to do this when they burst into your house late at night, to announce in loud voices that they have come to eat you up. For some reason, they think this is good fun.
There is no need to be worried when they say this. All you have to do is sneer at them, and tell them they can’t eat you, that animals with horns and hoofs do not eat meat, so they are wasting their time making threats like that. (Note that if you are a lettuce, you may need to run away instead.)
When the small horned monsters burst into tears, you may think you have been cruel, but you need to ask: did you invite them to come clattering around your house? Is it your fault they threatened you? If the answer to each question is ‘no’, then you have no need to worry.
A question of good manners: if you invite a monster into your house, then you have a duty to be polite to it, but there are certain rules. It must not clatter, moan, whine, sneeze loudly, sharpen its teeth on the furniture, or use your toothbrush to tidy up its hair or clean the mud off its feet. Small horned monsters do all of these things.
Any monster that breaks those rules has no right to be in your house. See how to get rid of annoying monsters at the end of this book, and remember that every monster has its weak points.
ORIGINS: They are generally similar to goats, and may have once been a domesticated breed of goats in the Ugly Islands, where the hills are too steep for goats to run on all four legs.
SIZE: Small. Well, what did you expect? Of course, some scientists think a better description is ‘very small’
UNUSUAL THINGS: They normally run around on their hind legs, except when tap dancing or trying to make a lot of clattering on a roof or a hard floor. More than most monsters, these ones like to frighten people, probably because it embarrasses them to think that they are really so harmless.
IS A THREAT TO: Anybody who is silly enough to think that horned, hoofed animals eat meat. These people will be frightened of them, but they shouldn’t be. They manage to worry cricket bats and other nervous monsters, so if you have a nervous monster that you want to keep, teach it about biology and digestion.
USES: Small horned monsters are no good to eat, because they taste and smell like old socks. Evil counts and other villains use them to keep the cricket bats away.
HATES: People who know their biology, people sneering at them, people cooking them, or even just looking at them, going ‘Hmm’ and reaching for a cookbook. They run away from short-sighted gobblesocks which identify old socks by their smell. They have not learned to fear bombats yet. Silly them!
LIKES: Grated carrots; limp lettuce; grass; celery and intelligent cabbage. They love honey, and will even eat sprouts if they are smothered in honey. They really enjoy musicals which feature tap dancing. They sometimes follow equinoxes around.
This monster is very hairy, has large eyes, and sometimes wears a pair of false gold-painted fangs to make it look fiercer.
These are small monsters in the lobster family. They have lots of friendly teeth and strange legs. They hide under upside-down buckets in the garden, waiting for slugs and snails. They prefer to roast their food over a candle, and they shelter under the bucket to avoid wind and rain that might put the candle out.
They are very loving, and like to be cuddled, but don’t let one get too close. If you do, you will discover that they have spiky skin and very bad breath because none of their legs has a toothbrush on the end of it. Even the bucket bogles admit their breath is a problem—it is dreadful enough to put their candles out. Sometimes, it’s even enough to make the candles run away.
Bucket bogles will live quite happily inside a piece of cloth or a bag, and bogle breeders have now developed a smooth-skinned strain that lives quite happily in pockets. This strain is sold in good pet shops as the pocket bogle. These have orange hair between their toes, and blue hair between their teeth, and are trained to brush their teeth (but not between their toes, and you have to buy them a new brush, once a month), so they do not smell anywhere near as bad as the ordinary garden bucket bogle. The pocket bogles smell even better if they are fed on celery, the outside leaves of lettuce, strawberries and a few dried bread crusts.
If you have a pet bucket bogle, be very careful about letting it juggle things that are either soft or fragile. If you are wondering why this is a problem, read up on what they have on the end of their legs, and you will start to see why it is unsafe to let them juggle kittens, fruit or wine glasses. The bucket bogle will be sorry afterwards, but not as sorry as the kitten.
ORIGINS: These monsters seem to have spread from their original home in the Amazon jungles to most parts of the world. There are no buckets in the Amazon jungles, but they used to collect old tortoise shells and live under those.
SIZE: Small enough to fit neatly in a pocket, though this must never be tried with bucket bogles from your garden, because their breath is bad enough to rot the stitching in your clothes, which could be very embarrassing.
UNUSUAL THINGS: They are land lobsters, so they have 14 legs, with different endings, but they only use the back two pairs of legs to walk.
IS A THREAT TO: Snails, slugs, noses and pockets. They eat cannibal corks when they can catch them. While they aren’t exactly a threat to kittens, fruit or wine glasses, they don’t improve them, either! They don’t like brown paper parcels tied up in string very much, and attack them whenever they see them.
USES: The bad breath acts as a snail and slug repellent, which sometimes makes it hard for them to catch any dinner. Any painted object left in a bogle’s bucket for 24 hours will have all of the paint stripped off it. Just one bogle in the garden will keep the slugs and snails under control.
HATES: Gobblesocks, which steal their socks while they are sleeping after a big meal, pudding monsters which knock over their buckets. The idea of eating raw food makes them very miserable, and when they think of raw food, they start sighing deeply, which usually blows their candle out. They really hate that.
LIKES: Buckets and being near saltwater warthogs.
The bucket bogle has 14 legs, and is also known as the Swiss Army prawn on account of the endings of its legs. The front legs each have a pair of nippers which they can use to hold their food over the candle flame, the next pair are a corkscrew (left) and auger (right), the third pair have a wire stripper (left—the juvenile bogles sometimes eat electrical insulation) and a nail file (right). The fourth pair are cutting blade (left) and saw blade (right), the fifth pair are knitting needles. They use the knitting needles to make small socks for the sixth and seventh pairs, which they use for walking.
Pudding monsters are seasonal pests which are found only in countri
es where Christmas Pudding is eaten. Despite its name, Christmas Pudding is not really a food, but an extremely dense form of low explosive. It does not actually go off with a bang, but if it hits you on the head, it feels as though your head has just gone off to do some shopping. Luckily, low explosives are more likely to hit your ankles, unless you stand on your head.
A large pudding monster can weigh as much as 11 kilograms, and it can bowl a pudding weighing three times as much down a busy street, sending pedestrians and vehicles in all directions. With five legs and three arms, it can keep up a lethal barrage of puddings for as long as the pudding supply lasts. The only known predators of pudding monsters are the invisigoths, who stalk them for sport on the high hills. This is possibly the reason why most pudding monsters now lurk in bowling alleys, where they are harder to notice.
ORIGINS: Unknown, but probably in England, where puddings are common, unlike Europe and America, where the puddings are all very refined and polite. Some people have wondered if they might have been another creation of the evil Count Henry Blenkinsop, but they seem to work too well to have come from someone so ungifted. It is likely that they are just naturally nasty.
SIZE: About the size of a bucket. Some scientists think this is why they attack the buckets of bucket bogles, because they mistake them for rivals. Others just think it is just the pudding monsters’ warped sense of humour.
UNUSUAL THINGS: Three of the five legs end in lockable wheels. If they are under threat, the pudding monster can scoot away on these three legs or if it is provoked by people throwing green custard, it has been known to charge them down.
IS A THREAT TO: Copywrong pirates: nobody knows why, but pudding monsters enjoy putting the feet of copywrong pirates into coffee cups, filling them with cement, and using the pirates as skittles. Nobody much likes copywrong pirates, but most other monsters either eat them or ignore them. When they are finished playing with the copywrong pirates, the pudding monsters make them hop the plank in their coffee cups. They claim they would like to do the same thing to the invisigoths, but they just can’t see them.
USES: There has been some military interest in using pudding monsters on the battlefield, but that is all marked Top Secret.
HATES: Running out of pudding; green custard (which they think is likely to contain invisigoths). They also hate trolls, because trolls are the only monsters that are not affected by a full pudding broadside from an A Grade squadron of pudding monsters. They don’t like baseball bats or cricket bats; spin bowlers; spin doctors, spinthariscopes, spinets or spinning wheels.
LIKES: Playing with food, collecting portraits of Queen Victoria, and arranging their food to make portraits of Queen Victoria, or poets of the same period. They really like drinking coffee. We know that copywrong pirates steal coffee, so this may explain their skittles games.
The pudding monster is easily recognised by the five legs, three of them with wheels, and the three arms. The four stalked eyes, on top of the domed tangerine-coloured body are also distinctive. They sometimes wear hats, because they think this helps disguise them. If you see a lamp post firing puddings down the street, it is probably a disguised pudding monster, though it may also be a post impressionist trying to do an impression of a pudding monster.
This monster looks like a Panama hat with a moustache, and it has eyes that only appear when you aren’t looking. The moustache is retractable, so you often see motets riding on people’s heads, looking just like an ordinary hat. The trick is catching the eyes snapping shut when you whirl around to look at somebody behind you who is wearing a motet. The motets are always too quick for you to see them, but the faster you are, the faster the eyes have to snap shut, and the louder the noise they make.
Motets often have unusual-sounding names in Latin that are even more unusual when you translate them. Spem in Alium (or Spam and Onions) is a famous engineer who builds palindromes. These are airstrips where aircraft that can’t spell can land from either end. Carpe Canem (or Seize the Dog) often works as a dog catcher. She says that dogs never realise that there is more to a Panama hat than meets the eye until it is too late.
In Roman times, motets looked like berets, and they only rode around on the heads of rich and famous people. This is why, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Mark Antony says ‘I come to beret Caesar, not to praise him’. Giving somebody a beret was better than praise back then.
Most motets work for the security services or the police, because they can switch from head to head in a crowd when they are following a suspect, and they have suction caps on their feet, so they can hang onto the back of a taxi or car. A few shady ones disguise themselves as black fedoras and work as private investigators. They say it is a job to dye for.
ORIGINS: It is likely that we will never know where they came from, but their enthusiasm for tubas tells us that they could not possibly be related to the moat monsters, even if the names sound similar.
SIZE: Hat sized. As they grow, they have to migrate to people with bigger heads. Most of them end up inhabiting politicians or sporting stars.
UNUSUAL THINGS: Their favourite hobby is making paper planes, so if you see a hat that keeps launching paper planes, you are probably looking at a motet.
IS A THREAT TO: Long-legged underbed pigs which are disguised as red setters. The motets jump on for a comfortable ride, and spoil the disguise. Everybody knows that red setters wear berets, not Panama hats.
USES: They are useful for making hat racks look inhabited. If a hat rack looks empty, drop nutters might decide to move in and hang there. Also, ceiling slimers and sleep eaters with slippery hands like to use any unused hooks on a hat rack. Motets are much nicer to have around, and they have better taste in music.
HATES: Being mistaken for a motel by small monsters or large ants which are careless readers. The motets say, and quite rightly, that Spelling Bees never make this mistake! The Spelling Bees sigh, and say that they wish people would notice that they are really Smelling Bees, and to please leave them out of the discussion. So there.
LIKES: Chamber music. Unfortunately, they believe that chamber music is played with an accordion, a cow bell, a tuba without its brass snake, three bowls of jelly and a detuned piano in an echo chamber. They also sing quite a lot, and their accordionists make a nice drink called accolade, which is probably the only accolade that any accordionist ever gets. It’s probably lucky for the motets that they don’t often encounter goth ravens or trolls, because their songs are exactly the sort that would really annoy trolls and goth ravens, and motets cannot run very fast. They just say that they like their music, and it takes all sorts ...
This monster is the only one that rides on people’s heads and does not eat or steal their hair. Trolls may look like hats for mountains, but out of all the monsters, only motets look like hats for people.
These pigs have a small body, a long hairy tail, and remarkably long legs. They are among the most nervous of monsters, and spend most of their lives hiding under beds, to avoid low-flying birds, especially sinking geese. They are remarkably clean, and can be taught to fetch a ball or do tricks.
Because of this, some people keep them as pets, but when they take them out to exercise, they fit them with red wigs, so people won’t think the owners are peculiar. If you see a nervous looking animal which is slightly like a red setter, but whose coat doesn’t fit very well, it may be a longlegged underbed pig. If you see a red setter wearing a Panama hat, you can be sure that it is a pig in a wig, and that a passing motet has decided to have a nice comfortable ride.
They whistle when running at high speed, performing an excellent version of ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’.
If you see a running animal that is whistling ‘The Minute Waltz’, this is probably a morphing murphy, though it might just be an extremely cunning long-legged underbed pig which is operating undercover rather than underbed, and trying desperately not to be seen.
ORIGINS: The pigs have extremely long and hairy tails, and seem to have evolved the
long legs to keep their tails out of the reach of aunt eaters. They must have evolved in a place where there were no overhanging trees to bang them on the head, probably a desert somewhere.
SIZE: About the size of a small rabbit, but with legs the size of those on a large dog or a short camel.
UNUSUAL THINGS: Because they have long legs, they keep banging their heads on the underside of beds, and scraping their backs. This leads some of them to attack any sinking geese that collide with them, so they can steal their crash helmets.
IS A THREAT TO: Sinking geese with crash helmets, beds with low legs, people who don’t like Wagner. If they see an aunt eater coming, they will squat down low to let the aunt eater run up onto their backs, then they will run under a bed, and straighten their legs, to give the aunt eater a headache.
USES: Pets, nothing much else. A longlegged underbed pig is cheaper to feed than a red setter, and it is also more intelligent. If you give them the right books to read, they will even do your homework for you.
HATES: People saying ‘leg ham’ or ‘leg of bacon’, sinking geese, aunt eaters with pogo sticks or portable trampolines. They loathe spam.
LIKES: Finding beds with long legs to hide under, low level bridges that they can use to scrape off unwanted riders. Their favourite food is sauerkraut, and they like to collect small, round river pebbles. If you want a longlegged underbed pig to stay, leave a small box of river pebbles under your bed. What they really like best of all is the works of the Dutch Old Masters, preferably as a curry, while listening to violin sonatas played on the tenor saxophone.
This monster is most easily recognised by its nervousness, its long legs and long hairy tail, with the crash helmet being a good indication if it is present. If you hear something whistling ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’, this is also a good sign. At night, thumps under your bed probably mean one or more longlegged underbed pigs are in there, but this is good, because they are very clumsy, and other monsters know to keep out of their way, except for gutter otters which like to shelter under the pigs when the sun is out or it is raining.
The Monster Maintenance Manual Page 6