The Monster Maintenance Manual

by Peter Macinnis

  LIKES: Watching sports like rugby where there is a lot of whistling, telling riddles and hearing riddles. This is another reason not to walk around with leopardchauns in your ears, because they would keep telling you riddles instead of playing music.

  This monster is a master of disguise, and often hides in a fruit bowl, where it can be recognised by the way it smells of apple. This is not a very intelligent thing to do, but nobody said the leopardchaun was smart, just that it is the most intelligent animal that looks like a banana. In fact, it is the only animal that looks like a banana—other animals are smarter than that, and they know about deaf monkeys. To test whether or not there is a leopardchaun under your bed, ask three riddles. If you hear answers to two or three of them, there is probably a leopardchaun there.

  These monsters can look quite savage when cornered, but unless you are a potato, you have nothing to worry about. They look very like dirty brown potatoes, and their main food is raw potato, so you will usually find them hidden among these vegetables, resting between meals. You can tell which is which, because the eyes on a real potato are green shoots, while the eyes of a morphing murphy are glittering and bloodshot, and they follow you around the room, or even chase you out of the house and pursue you down the street.

  When you pick up a morphing murphy, it will shriek and open its mouth, showing lots of pointed teeth, as it pokes spikes out, all over its body, but there is nothing to worry about, because the spikes and teeth are soft, and only for show. Morphing murphies are ferocious when they savage a potato, and the potatoes know this. If one is lurking in the potato box, the whole herd of potatoes will stand completely still, as they know that the morphing murphies only like to bring down live prey on the run.

  If you look in the potato container, and the potatoes are not moving, either there is a morphing murphy in there, or the potatoes have mistaken you for a morphing murphy, or you really are a morphing murphy, and just don’t know it. Check your teeth, and see if they are soft, just in case.

  The morphing murphies also like to stew up koalas to make a sort of tea. Most people who do this prefer to sieve out the bones and lumpy bits, but the morphing murphies are very strict about leaving the bones in the pot. The koala tea of murphies is not strained.

  If you ever find some bits and pieces of morphing murphy in the potato container, this probably means that there are part eaters living in your house. Part eaters really like potatoes, not to eat, but as their friends, and they get really annoyed when they are sitting around in the sun, chatting with a spud and the conversation stops because one of the talkers has just been eaten. Never annoy a part eater!

  ORIGINS: Fossil evidence says these monsters evolved in the home of the potato, which is in South America, but they are now found in most parts of the world.

  SIZE: Depends on how recently it has fed, but roughly the size of a potato. If it is the size of a big potato, it has probably just had a meal.

  UNUSUAL THINGS: The morphing murphy is very cunning, and will often not show its teeth or spikes. See How to spot one (on the next page) for a way around this, because sometimes the morphing murphy pays for its cleverness by being cooked and eaten. Most people think that eating fox is fairly unusual. They don’t agree.

  IS A THREAT TO: Potatoes, carrots silly enough to imitate potatoes and also invisigoths unwise enough to camp in a container of potatoes. The morphing murphies hate it when they become invisible, which happens when there are invisigoths nearby.

  USES: If you are having a problem with foxes in your pumpkin patch, you need to encourage morphing murphies to live there. You can do this by sprinkling small amounts of mustard on the ground. While they like eating potatoes, some farmers say that dogs used to be wolves that ate sheep, but sheep dogs control and help manage sheep flocks. Researchers hope that morphing murphies may help them raise free range potatoes. Imagine the happy sight, as majestic potato herds roam the hill-sides, guarded and guided by morphing murphies!

  HATES: Moat monsters, especially moat monsters with short sight. Morphing murphies don’t like pumpkin, which is why they are such perfect guards in a pumpkin patch. They also hate pumps and pugs, but the things they hate more than anything else is pins, pans and puns.

  LIKES: Potatoes and raw fox nose, especially if it comes with mustard—but mainly, they like potatoes. They also eat tender young spaghetti when they can.

  This monster is easily detected by putting a suspect potato in with a group of oranges and watching to see if it changes. If the suspect is placed between a pinecone and an apple, it tries to change to look like a pineapple. If you look at a pile of potatoes and say you believe in calling a spud a spud, the one that quivers is the morphing murphy.

  These cruel monsters only ever pick on grownups. They come around at night, with tubes of superglue. They love to glue hair in silly places, like coming out of the grownups’ noses (which is how they get their name) but they also glue hair in their victims’ ears. If grownups sleep with their mouths open, the nose ghouls sometimes glue hair to their tongues or teeth. Superglue is good for that (and bad for humans).

  Grownups don’t like admitting that nose ghouls exist, so they make up all sorts of stories about nazguls and things like that, hoping that if you hear them talking about nose ghouls, you will just think they are discussing nazguls. It is polite not to let them know that you know that they don’t know that you know. If you tried to explain that to adults, they would just get confused. Say nothing!

  The nose ghouls think it is funny to glue lawyers’ noses to the backs of ambulances, so the lawyers are forced to chase along behind the ambulances, all over town. Lawyers say the nose ghouls only do it because the black robes that the lawyers wear are much nicer than the nose ghouls’ cloaks.

  Scientists wondered why nose ghouls are more common at certain times of the year. In Australia, they are most common in summer, around Easter and in spring. It appears that nose ghoul plagues are caused by children shouting ‘no school today!’ when school holidays are on. Nose ghouls often put left-over glue in their ears, and think the children are shouting ‘nose ghoul today!’.

  ORIGINS: Unknown, but they seem to have been around ever since there were humans. They used to be called nose gluers, and the change came because they are all so bad at spelling.

  SIZE: Very small and hard to see, just a few millimetres high.

  UNUSUAL THINGS: Nose ghouls look like very small male vampires. They wear black cloaks, and it takes about 15 of them to carry the tube of glue. They have fangs like vampires as well, but they only use their fangs to bite hairs to the right length.

  IS A THREAT TO: Almost hairless dogs (now you can work out how the dogs got to be almost hairless).

  USES: No known uses. People have tried to get them to do makeup work in the theatre and for television, using them mainly to do false beards and moustaches. The problem is that the nose ghouls are naughty, and keep sticking the hair on so it is pointing in the wrong direction. This is sometimes funny when they do it to politicians, but after a while, it gets boring.

  HATES: Being crushed when somebody turns over the pillow while they are sneaking up on them, and sleepers who sneeze and blow them away. They don’t like drop nutters or aunt eaters to be in the same house as them because drop nutters and aunt eaters undo all of their hard work. They really hate any sort of glue that comes unstuck easily, but their biggest dislike of all is barrel organs, the polka, with a double serving of dislike for people who like dancing the polka to barrel organ music.

  LIKES: Attaching hairs in funny places on large people. They also like garlic. Actually, they don’t like garlic all that much, but they think that if they smell of garlic, people will realise that they are not vampires after all. When they are not working, nose ghouls enjoy collecting weather records for strange places and making vases out of paper clips.

  This monster is rarely seen, and is usually recognised only by the work that it does. If you see a monster looking like a very small male vampire,
it is better to ask if it is a nose ghoul. Vampires don’t mind you making that mistake, but nose ghouls hate being treated as vampires and they get very cranky. If you ask ‘What was the maximum temperature in Ulan Bator on 24 May 1927?’, and you get an answer coming out of the furniture, there is probably a nose ghoul within hearing range.

  Lurking in ordinary garden hoses and in nylon fire hoses, these worms are harmless so long as they keep swimming when water is passing through the hose. If they stop swimming, they are washed along and become jammed in the nozzle, and sometimes make the hose burst. To check a hose for hose worms, connect it, turn on the water supply, and feel the hose for the telltale vibrations of the swimming hose worms.

  Hose worms never come into the house, except when you take a hose in there, so they are hardly ever a problem. If you have a spaghetti infestation, sometimes the spaghetti will try to shelter in the hose, and be eaten by the hose worms. This diet can make the hose worms fat and lazy.

  Fat lazy hose worms are a problem, because they don’t swim fast enough, and they end up blocking the nozzle. Then again, if they hadn’t eaten the spaghetti, then the hose would still have been blocked, so try to manage the spaghetti numbers yourself, and there will be no problems. Eat more spaghetti!

  There was once a giant breed of hollow hose worms in the deserts of Western Australia. Once the nose ghouls found that you could glue these worms together to make water pipelines, they became rare, and the nose ghouls became very rich for a short while. If giant hose worms still exist, they are very good at hiding.

  ORIGINS: Hose worms are quite unusual, because they look like worms, but they have a backbone, just like a snake or a fish. Some scientists believe that they are descended from the blind white fish that live in water tunnels called qanats in Iran. Other scientists say that the hose worms have eyes, so that shows how much the other scientists know, and about this time, the scientists’ mothers have to step in and tell them to behave.

  SIZE: About the same size as a small earthworm.

  UNUSUAL THINGS: They remind many people of drain monsters but this may just be because they are so hard to see. Nobody knows very much about them—except for the hose worms, and they aren’t telling.

  IS A THREAT TO: Wandering spaghetti, people drinking from hoses which are flowing very fast. They try very hard to be threatening to trolls, but their voices are very quiet, so the trolls don’t hear them and just roll right over them.

  USES: Despite several attempts to answer this question, no use has been found for them. They are useless for making paper, animals won’t eat them and they are hopeless at composting. No hose worm has ever won a Nobel Prize, their poetry is dreadful, and their music is boring. So is their sculpture, because the only statues they ever make are of hose worms.

  HATES: Hoses that burst, rotating water sprinklers (they get dizzy easily) and raw spaghetti, which gives them indigestion. They don’t like cold weather and they really hate it when it is cold enough to freeze the water in a hose. They hate soya sauce because they know the problems it causes.

  LIKES: Eating spaghetti, even if it isn’t cooked (they say hunger is worse than indigestion). They also enjoy reading light historical fiction and taking quiet walks in the early evening when the trolls are having dinner.

  This monster is transparent, so you can never see it in the water. You can just about make them out if you pour a thin layer of soya sauce over hose worms that are lying on a white saucer. It does not make them any more tasty, but you can sort of see them.

  The only thing gumboot greeners like more than filling one gumboot with green slime is filling two gumboots, a pair of galoshes and a mail box with green slime.

  They started filling gumboots as a way of working out who was Top Monster in their tribe. They later invented gumboot diplomacy, which meant attacking the gumboots of foreign ambassadors. This is why most diplomats have a very serious expression on their faces. Walk around in a pair of shoes full of green slime, and you begin to get an idea of the problems diplomats face.

  Gumboot greeners are solitary, and you will only rarely get two in the same place at the same time. They are masters of disguise, and often disguise themselves as gumboots. When a gumboot greener finds a real gumboot, it thinks it is actually another gumboot greener, and covers it in green slime. Nobody has yet been able to work out why they like attacking mailboxes and galoshes.

  The slime has a number of practical uses. Troppos use the slime to dye the feathers on their fur. Bucket bogles use the slime as glue to keep their socks on when they sleep. Longlegged underbed pigs use the slime to keep their wigs on when they are running at high speed in rough countryside. Pink elephants use the slime to glue feathers to their ears.

  Gumboot greeners have a lot of trouble crossing open water, as this dissolves away their slime supplies, and some scientists now think this is why they hate quarking ducks, because the ducks deliberately damage bridges. Sinking geese actually do more harm when they fly into bridges, and moby ducks cause considerable harm when they roost on bridges, but as these species do not wear gumboots, there is very little the gumboot greeners can do to them. Quarking ducks have not yet realised why they have so much trouble with their gumboots.

  ORIGINS: They are believed to be related to the ceiling slimer, but they are much larger. They were first recorded in 1814, and many modern scientists think they were developed by scientists working for the French emperor, Napoleon, as a secret weapon to attack the boots of the Duck of Wellington.

  SIZE: Greeners are about the size of an average gumboot, but each gumboot greener manages to include a sac filled with 30 litres of green slime.

  UNUSUAL THINGS: Like ceiling slimers, they can climb walls.

  IS A THREAT TO: Gumboots; galoshes; people who deliver mail of any sort and quarking ducks, who sometimes find themselves glued into their gumboots.

  USES: The slime is used as a dye and glue by several other monsters. Nose ghouls have tried using the slime to stick hair on people, but they say they are not impressed. According to them clotted cream works just as well (which isn’t saying much) but the cream smells much worse when it goes off.

  HATES: Quarking ducks, which may explain why they seek out the gumboots of quarking ducks and slime them.

  LIKES: Asparagus; bales of hay; seaweed biscuits; green tea; green chocolate and chocolate-coated hay. They are extremely fond of green traffic lights and always stop to admire them, but they hate red lights and always drive through them.

  If you see what looks like a gumboot halfway up a wall, it is probably a gumboot greener, and if you see a gumboot that seems to be attacking another boot, shake both gumboots carefully to see if there is any slime in one of them. If there are three boots together, one of them is almost certainly a gumboot greener. Note that some of them disguise themselves as buckets, which can really surprise and annoy a bucket bogle.

  Quarking ducks love to march in formation, keeping step, and chanting ‘quark, quark, quark-quark-quark’ as they go; they wear beautifully polished black boots with steel toecaps and hobnails on the soles. They only march on level surfaces. The last time a flock of quarking ducks tried marching on a sloping roof, they ended up in a heap on top of the last surviving duck muncher. They say it came out all right that time, but now there are no more duck munchers to land on, it is too risky to march on a roof any more.

  Each flock of quarking ducks keeps a trained shoelace monster, which they feed on juicy earthworms in exchange for doing up and undoing their bootlaces. When they go into damp areas to look for worms to feed their shoelace monsters, the ducks put on their gumboots to keep their feet dry. Gumboot greeners know this, and like to find the gumboots and green them. Quarking ducks are not very good at realising this, and often find themselves stuck in the gumboots, because the green slime is also a very good glue and can stop the ducks marching in their best boots for up to two months.

  The quarking ducks have one very nasty habit: they like to march across bridges, stamping the
ir feet, and on several occasions, they have managed to cause a bridge to collapse from this rhythmic stamping. So long as they are glued into their gumboots, they are unable to harm any bridges because gumboots don’t have hobnails and steel caps.

  Quarking ducks name themselves after famous scientists. They like to say they are scientists who study particle physics, but this is only because they like smashing things into tiny fragments. It thrills them to bits, they say, but when scientists hear this sort of talk, they go to pieces.

  There is one very nasty quarking duck who likes jumping on the heads of scientists. This is Fat Albert, who named himself after Albertus Magnus (which is just ‘fat Albert’ in Latin). All scientists worry about a Fat Al Error, which is what happens when Fat Albert drops on them from too high up.

  Fat Albert mainly operates in Germany, where Albertus Magnus lived, and a lot of German scientists wear spiky helmets when they go outside. Now you know why.

  ORIGINS: These are just ordinary ducks with a very unusual hobby and very peculiar tastes in clothing and footwear. Some of them can be quite fat.

  SIZE: Duck sized to over sized.

  UNUSUAL THINGS: The boots are the most obvious feature. When you get to know the quarking ducks, you may discover that unlike most monsters, they quite like mathematics. They are the only monsters who encourage hairyoddities, because even when the music is bad, they can march to it, and if they stamp hard enough, they can drown the music out. They always stamp hard enough.

  IS A THREAT TO: Gumboot greeners, when they catch them, which isn’t very often.

  USES: You can use them as an excuse for leaving things on your bedroom floor, because even a few scattered toys will spoil their marching, and make them go away.