HATES: They don’t like carpet or soft grass, where their marching can’t be heard. They used to hate duck munchers, but not any more, because there aren’t any. They hate floors with things lying on them. They really hate getting their gumboots filled with slime. Seeing a gumboot filled with green jelly is enough to make them leave town.
LIKES: Tiled floors, wooden floors, concrete slabs and level roofs. They also like doing card tricks and dancing on fragile things.
This monster is most likely to come around at night and march around your bedroom if you have a good floor for marching on. You will hear them first, as they come down the street, but they won’t come inside unless the door is open.
This is probably the most unpleasant monster you can hope to meet. Of course, if you are silly enough to hope to meet one, they will stay right away from you, because saltwater warthogs are the most unobliging monsters known to science. They lie, they cheat, they smell of dead seaweed that has been left in a bucket, they are incredibly ugly, and they snicker about you behind your back. They leave gates and doors open, they leave the refrigerator open at night. They eat the last of the soap in the bathroom, and say nothing about it.
They are completely dishonest. Saltwater warthogs don’t come from saltwater, and they don’t even live in water, because they are desert animals. They aren’t warthogs either, so how’s that for lying? They cheat at hide-and-seek, they take more than their fair share of the food, and they never do their chores. They have no hands, but they have a long tentacle on top of their heads that is fitted with a sucker, that they use to take food and soap. Never ask one to lend you a hand, because that will start the nasty beast snickering.
The good thing is that they smell so bad, grownups will chase them out of the house as soon as they get close. Some people think they eat soap because they hope it will clean them, others think they eat the soap so they can foam at the mouth. The rest of us just think they are very silly monsters.
On three occasions, monster circuses have been founded, using giant hoop snakes to mark out the three rings, underbed lions in the lion-taming, and so on. In each case, the circus failed because the customers could not stand the saltwater warthogs.
ORIGINS: Intensive searching around the world has failed to find any country willing to own up to being the original home of this rare monster. They may eat soap, but they do not appear to be related to the soap slurper.
SIZE: About as big as a medium sized dog (if you leave out the long tentacle thing on their head). The tentacles are between 2 and 3 metres long, but coil down into a neat beehive shape.
UNUSUAL THINGS: The tentacle and the smell. Mainly the smell; yes, definitely the smell.
IS A THREAT TO: Piano tunas, which they rarely manage to catch, because piano tunas have a very good sense of smell, not that it needs to be that good.
USES: If you are really ugly, keep a saltwater warthog as a pet. It won’t actually make you look better by comparison, but it will keep people so far away that they will have no idea what you look like.
HATES: Clean teeth; the smell of toothpaste; happy people and smiles. Long-haired cats and dogs, which they sneak up on, so they can get their hair in tangles. They really don’t like green rabbits which are misled by the smell into chomping them. They really hate people laughing at them. Doesn’t every monster? Actually, the main problem with what saltwater warthogs hate is the risk of running out of paper to write it down. They hate the food they eat and where they have to sleep, which is a long way from anybody else.
LIKES: Soap, other saltwater warthogs, as nothing else is prepared to be liked by them, except maybe the bucket bogles. Bucket bogles don’t really like them either, but if they hang out with saltwater warthogs, nobody notices their bad breath. Saltwater warthogs like puns, but nobody realises this because they don’t stay within sniffing or hearing distance. This is why they like people with very bad colds and people who work in smelly industries, because while these people will eventually smell them, the saltwater warthogs have a chance to get some sleep.
This monster is easily recognised by the way it snickers. If you think you can see one, look for the tentacle on top of the head, and sniff for the terrible smell. You don’t need anything else. Perhaps a gas mask.
These fishy monsters have developed lungs and so they can live on land, but they hate having muddy feet. To avoid getting their feet sloshy, they prefer to live in musical instruments. Some scientists say that the piano tunas don’t mind the muddy feet and they hide in the instruments so saltwater warthogs cannot get to them. Then again, piano tunas may live in instruments so as to be nice and close when people play scales. They like any sort of music that is about them. Then again (again), maybe they do it because they like to shelter somewhere out of the rain.
If you have an upright piano that is not sealed at the bottom, there will probably be a few piano tunas living inside it. They try to help people play the piano, but often hit a wrong note by mistake, because piano tunas have their own ideas about what scales should be like.
To fix this problem, you need to call in a Piano Tuna Undoer, Neutraliser, Exorcist and Removalist, or Piano TUNER, who will get rid of them for you. The piano tuner brings a goat, a broom, a sink plunger, a large bottle of oil, a portable stove, a frying pan, a wicker basket and a vacuum cleaner, but how they use these to get rid of the piano tunas is a trade secret. There is always a smell of watermelon in the air when they are finished, so that probably gives us a hint.
Piano tunas can move very fast when they need to, as they have twelve legs that they can fold back into small gaps in their bodies, and they have two antennae that vibrate like a tuning fork. Each leg has a single toe on it—enough to play twelve-toed music.
When the Eurovision Song Contest was started by the goth ravens and the trolls, they made sure that all the sound engineers were piano tunas. They knew exactly what they were doing, because they wanted to make people hate songs.
ORIGINS: Although some of them live in pianos, there are more of the adults living inside woodwinds and double basses, and piano tunas get their name from their black and white scales, not from where they live. Young piano tunas prefer woodwinds and violas, but they always have to compete for space with the ceiling slimers, which are more ferocious. There is a related species called the concertuna, which lives in squeeze boxes.
SIZE: Piano tunas are about 30 centimetres long and about 1 centimetre across, and they look a bit like a garfish. They are very flexible, and young ones look rather more like spaghetti.
UNUSUAL THINGS: Just another skinny and bony fish. They are too bony to make good eating, and they exercise very hard to keep it that way.
IS A THREAT TO: Good music.
USES: While they cause you to play wrong notes, they can still be useful, because you can always tell grownups that it isn’t your fault, it is the fault of the piano tuna. If you need to play well, you can always put a peg on your nose and send in a saltwater warthog to clean your instrument out, or put a peg on your nose and go in yourself, so long as you get rid of the piano tuna. A piano tuna, soaked in wet cement, makes a handy replacement for a door step, but if you step on it going in and out, you will soon find that your shoes rot.
HATES: They hate seeing people with pegs on their noses. Saltwater warthogs, which like to eat them. They really don’t like jelly in any form, so if you fill an instrument with jelly, this will persuade the piano tunas to move out, but it also, usually, makes the instrument hard to play.
LIKES: Atonal music; toenail music; scales; the sound of shattered glass falling on concrete; shattered concrete falling on glass or on saltwater warthogs.
This monster is recognised mainly by its shape and its black and white scales, though the twelve legs and the antennae are also distinctive.
When you hear voices shouting rude things at you at night, this is probably the sound of an African shouting spider. They don’t really shout, but they do rub two of their legs across their fangs and this makes
a shouting noise. In this species, the surface at the end of each leg is hard, and covered in tiny grooves, like an old-fashioned gramophone record. The fang works like a needle on a gramophone record, making a sheet of spider-web silk vibrate, changing the vibration into a sound.
For some reason, the noise they make always sounds like a very insulting message in the local language. Nobody knows quite why this is, but a number of scientists have been working on breeds that say particularly nasty things in other languages—the plan is to use the spiders to start enemy soldiers fighting each other.
This is Top Secret, and we cannot tell you about it here. In fact, forget we ever mentioned it. There is no such place as the Count Henry Blenkinsop Junior Military Science Memorial Laboratory.
Curiously, a special breed of these spiders has now been developed in the non-existent ‘Henry Blenkinsop Junior Memorial Military Science Laboratory’. They knit spider-silk socks which play military marches as the wearer walks. Equinoxes really like these socks.
ORIGINS: According to the scientists, these spiders came originally from southern Africa, and seem to have stowed away on ships. Recently, one was found in an isolated valley in Italy, making a sound very like mater tua caligas gerit, which is north Umbrian Latin for ‘your mother wears army boots’. This makes scientists think the spiders may have been in Europe since the time of the ancient Romans. They were mentioned by Benjamin Franklin in North America in 1755, and were seen in Australia as early as 1798.
SIZE: The body is about 2 centimetres long, and it has hairy legs that are about 4 centimetres long. A lot of people get quite worried when they see one of these spiders, and they say it is because there are eight hairy legs, but if that was right, why are people not as frightened by two red setters?
UNUSUAL THINGS: The sheet of spider silk that is stretched between the front legs, and the rude comments that they seem to make. When the spider runs, it trips over the sheet of silk, which is why it often hops like a kangaroo.
IS A THREAT TO: Anybody who is easily insulted. People who are in the habit of putting mud, dead fish or live leopardchauns in their ears don’t mind them at all.
USES: They can be used to cause trouble in the offices and factories of business rivals, and one African shouting spider in a sports dressing-room can leave a team of players upset and furious with each other for three weeks.
HATES: People with recording machines. There are no recordings of an African shouting spider in existence, but many known cases of people being found in a delirium, clutching a recorder with nothing on it and mumbling about spiders. Draw your own conclusions!
LIKES: Upsetting people by saying nasty things, collecting pictures of bananas and reading books about the ancient art of tofu arranging. They enjoy eightsome reels, which they can do with just two of them.
This jet-black spider has long legs, a sheet of silk between the tips of the front legs, and usually hides in a corner of a room, or behind furniture. It jumps very well, so wherever you look, it is probably behind you.
These are a separate sub-species of the African shouting spider, which have somehow gained the skill of recording embarrassing comments on the last segments of their legs, so that when they ‘play back’, you generally hear something that somebody (you or somebody else) would prefer not to have repeated. Scientists understand how these ‘recordings’ are made, but they have yet to work out how the spider seems always to record the most embarrassing bits.
Their name is wrong, because they don’t tell the truth any more than a recording does, but they record what was really said, and they repeat it. Criminals and spies know all about these spiders, and when they talk of sweeping a room for bugs, it is the truth-teller spiders that they are really worried about.
If a truth-teller spider comes into your room, amuse yourself by saying things like ‘I am a very silly spider’. The spider has no idea what it is playing back, so it won’t get angry, unless you are an invisigoth, because they really hate them. You don’t have to worry though, because even if you are an invisigoth, they can’t see you and, it seems they have never seen one. It also seems that they don’t like voices coming out of nowhere.
The way invisigoths see it (or in this case, don’t see it), a voice coming out of nowhere just has to be something that is better camouflaged than they are. If they thought about it, they would remember that ridiculous things like the fluoro camouflage suits they sold to the cryptobears are impossible to see. Nothing is more ridiculous than a truth-teller spider.
ORIGINS: Unknown, but many people suspect one of the world’s major intelligence services may have bred them, hoping to record short snippets of interesting conversation. Other people think it was a sane scientist who created it. It was almost certainly not Count Henry Blenkinsop, who was neither intelligent nor sane. Then again, he wasn’t a scientist either.
SIZE: The body is about 2 centimetres long and very narrow, considering that the recording unit seems to have been derived from an old video recorder.
UNUSUAL THINGS: The thing to look out for is the sheet of spider silk between the front legs which is used to focus the sound onto the recorder parts. The way it repeats comments is also unusual, because it waits until the room is quiet to play back what it has recorded.
IS A THREAT TO: Anybody with a guilty conscience, or anybody who has said something they don’t want repeated.
USES: None at this stage, although research is continuing. A number of important people who have been recorded have said what they would like to do with the truth-teller spider, most of it involving grinding it into a fine powder, though hammers, flails, nails, chainsaws and exploding bread. These are not really uses.
HATES: People with recording machines. They don’t like competition and stop recording or playing back when there is a recorder present. This is why there are no recordings of a truth-teller spider in existence. They also hate word puzzles, so now you know how to get rid of them.
LIKES: None known. When asked what they like, they always just repeat the question. They seem to spend a lot of time at the movies, but maybe they just like the dark, or the leftover popcorn. They have one nasty habit: in the movies, they always repeat the punch line of a joke before the joke is finished.
This monster is hard to tell from an African shouting spider if you just look at it. Talk and listen to it, to see what it says. If it says nothing, it may be sulking because it doesn’t like the weather. If it says something about the weather being bad when the sun is shining, it isn’t a spider at all, but a disguised morphing murphy.
These are very useful animals that live beneath the sand on beaches, where they eat the rubbish that people leave behind. Most of this rubbish is bad for them, and if they are hungry enough, they will move into the sea at night and hunt fish, or bite the legs off seagulls.
Their natural food is seaweed, washed onto the shore, but too many people expect the beaches to be kept clean, and when the seaweed is raked up, the sand monsters have to make do with rubbish and seagulls’ legs. The larger ones will attack a moby duck, if one comes on to their beach, and the largest ones will also eat dogs, which is why some beaches have signs saying ‘No Dogs Allowed’.
Sand monsters live about a hand span below the surface of the sand so when you walk over the beach, you will sometimes hear them squeaking as your weight presses down on them, especially if the sand is hot. On other beaches, they burrow deeper as they hear you coming, so you never hear them on those beaches. They sometimes go for a swim to see if they can catch a fish, especially if the beach is cleaned regularly.
Sand monsters do not normally come into a house, but if you keep getting into bed with sandy feet, you may end up with a sand monster settling in to live at the foot of your bed. Get rid of the sand before it is deep enough for a sand monster to burrow into it, or make friends with it.
ORIGINS: They are believed to have escaped from a secret laboratory in Silicon Valley owned by Count Henry Blenkinsop Junior, where they were being bred as ri
ding animals for industrial-grade copywrong pirates.
SIZE: They are disc-shaped, from 10 centimetres to more than a metre across when fully grown, but only a few centimetres thick. Their legs are about 30 centimetres long.
UNUSUAL THINGS: They have four long legs, on which they can run very fast across the sand, and they use them to burrow out of reach when you try to hunt them.
IS A THREAT TO: Dogs, gulls, fish, dead seaweed—and saltwater warthogs (which smell like dead seaweed, but don’t taste as nice).
USES: They help clean the beaches. If you get enough people on the beach at one time, and if they jump from sand monster to sand monster, you can make some interesting music, though the sand monsters say it leaves them flat.
HATES: Getting a mouthful of saltwater warthog when they expected some nice dead seaweed; people who leave rubbish on beaches; quarking ducks with spurs. If somebody uses spurs on them, they dig into the sand and stop suddenly, a habit that the copywrong pirates don’t like, which is why the sand monsters do it. The smaller sand monsters are really offended when dogs mistake them for ‘frisbees’ and run around with them.
LIKES: Fried seagull leg, though they usually have to eat it raw. They especially like sand which has been mixed with a few herbs to make it smell nice. As a rule, they like doing anything that goes against the grain. They like taking holidays in sandpits or in deserts which have an adequate supply of seaweed, and they always send home postcards written on sandpaper. The larger sand monsters enjoy chasing and fetching retriever dogs.
This monster is transparent and it is shaped a bit like a flying saucer with a large mouth along one edge. The mouth has very many gleaming white teeth, stretching all the way from one front leg to the other. The surface is covered in iridescent blue scales, which help it slide through the sand. Dead ones are often mistaken for jellyfish, once the scales fall off.
The Monster Maintenance Manual Page 9