The Monster Maintenance Manual

by Peter Macinnis

  If you have ceiling slimers in your house, it is important not to leave the television on, because they are very quick to pick up ideas, but they never get them quite right. The worst thing to let them watch is any sort of winter sports like figure skating. Think about a crowd of ceiling slimers, all singing the music they want to skate to, all whirling around your ceiling at the same time. Letting them watch the luge, sumo wrestling and horse racing can also lead to problems you don’t need.

  ORIGINS: The ceiling slimers once lived in the canopy of the Amazon rainforest. They used the warm tropical air to get up to the canopy, the rich branch layer at the top of the rain forest trees, where they used to eat rainforest insects. As so many of the world’s rainforests have been cut down, the ceiling slimers have been forced to spread out and find new homes.

  SIZE: Fully inflated, they are about the same size as a large cabbage, but they are more often seen in the partly-inflated state, when they are about the size of a grapefruit.

  UNUSUAL THINGS: The bright yellow colour is the best thing to look out for. When filled with hot air, they glow in the dark. They like sheltering in woodwind instruments, and musicians know to give their instruments a good shake before they start playing, in order to get the ceiling slimers out.

  IS A THREAT TO: Insects and other ceiling monsters like ceiling thumpers and ceiling hangers. They make life very difficult for burglar cats and cat burglars as they chase each other across your ceiling.

  USES: Keeping insects under control. If you have enough of them, and you can persuade them that face painting is fun, they can make some very amusing decorations, though they will make your room too bright for lamington monsters to play their guitars.

  HATES: Baseball bats, which eat them. The sound of a concert pitch A is especially frightening for them, as this is the sound made by a baseball bat when it is hunting. The instruments of an orchestra all play that note at the start of a concert, to flush out any ceiling slimers that have crept in.

  LIKES: Politicians and other inexhaustible supplies of hot air; trampolines and springboards, but not pogo sticks, because the sticks don’t give them enough lift. They enjoy singing sad songs about Cold Urticaria. They never lived there, but they learned the songs from the invisigoths, and the songs never include a concert pitch A.

  This monster is easy to spot. If you see what looks like a yellow balloon swooping across your bedroom ceiling, or if there is a balloon lurking in one corner and lots of insects are stuck to your ceiling, you have a ceiling slimer.

  The molar moles are named after their teeth, because they have no front ones. All they have is back teeth, the molars that they use to crunch nuts, and the fingers of anybody silly enough to put a finger all the way into a molar mole’s mouth. The moles are actually very polite and only crunch people’s fingers in a friendly way, and always apologise afterwards. The fingers, they point out, always heal after a month or so.

  They are often messy eaters and eat mainly beetroot, custard, blueberry pie and jelly. This explains why they are also known as molar moles of many colours. To be correct, they are really molar marsupial moles of many colours or marsupial molar moles of many colours. As marsupials, they have a pouch to carry young molar moles, some emergency food, face paint and tin openers. They carry most of their food around in tins; they’re tucked inside a pillow so as to stop the rattling.

  Most types of mole around the world dig burrows and tunnels, but molar moles refuse to dig. They still like tunnels though, and can often be found in great tunnels all over the world, so long as somebody else did the digging. It was probably this interest in tunnels that started them spreading around the world from their home in Australia, where they are a pest to wombats, rabbits, trapdoor spiders and miners.

  Hungarian molar mole Cespit Ole went to Holywood and founded Tunnel Vision Studios after changing his name by Deed Hole to Cecil B. de Mole. His many movies about tunnels were written by Edgar Rice Burrows and directed by the Australian molar mole Charles Shovel. Sadly, the critics called them boring.

  ORIGINS: The molar moles came from Australia, then travelled all over the world once they found good ways of stowing away on aircraft. These days, they either buy tickets or else they mail themselves in map tubes, or hide in musical instruments taken on aeroplanes. They especially like to ride in tubas, but they only do so after asking the tuba’s resident brass snake.

  SIZE: About the size of a large rat, but with a much rounder and more intelligent, colourful face.

  UNUSUAL THINGS: They are friendly and helpful, but just a little bit boring. They only have two things to talk about: colourful food and tunnels. They make very good pets, because their boring talk would put anybody to sleep, even sleep eaters. It doesn’t work for their own sleep, though, because they think long talks about tunnels and tunnel boring are the best thing since tinned beetroot soup.

  IS A THREAT TO: Visigoths, who sometimes feel that the molar moles are more colourful than they are. A few visigoths think molar moles would be happy to eat a colourful visigoth, but nobody has ever seen this happen. The visigoths say this is because nobody has seen it happen and survive, but the molar moles just grin, laugh nastily and run away, saying nothing. Maybe they think it is rude to speak with your mouth full. If it is raining and they are inspecting a railway tunnel, they may accidentally tread on spaghetti that are sheltering from the rain, but they don’t do this on purpose.

  USES: They are mainly useful if you can’t sleep, or if your hobby is collecting pictures of the world’s great tunnels, because the molar moles know where all the best tunnels are, and can help you stow away on planes to get there cheaply.

  HATES: Moat monsters, because moat monsters eat tubas, and so sometimes eat molar moles by mistake. Molar moles really hate bibs. They also hate snickering lizards which keep them awake; they will steal cakes of soap from soap slurpers and push them into the mouths of the lizards, to quieten them down.

  LIKES: Colourful foods, tunnels, especially tunnels with echoes, international travel, frequent-flyer points. They also like opening parcels that contain pieces of rock. Nobody has ever been able to find out what they do with the rocks, but most scientists think that they chew them up and swallow them.

  This monster is most easily recognised by the bright dribbles down its chest from eating too many colourful foods, and its lack of front teeth.

  Gutter otters are very small, generally otter shaped, and have very short legs. They are extremely heavy, and some people think the reason their legs are so short is because longer legs would break under the strain. They are unable to float, and this forces them to stay in very shallow water, like that found in gutters during dry weather.

  Gutter otters prefer to speak in rhyme, and one of their most common sayings is, ‘It’s better in the gutter with a little bit of butter’, reminding us of two things about gutter otters: they will happily live in dry gutters, and they like walking on butter dishes, where they leave deep but tiny footprints (or boot prints in winter).

  They eat flatworms or anything that looks like a flatworm, which means just about anything they have stepped on, even rocks. They eat lots of flatworms, because these heavy otters need lots of energy, just to move around. This is why they prefer their flatworms cooked in bitter butter batter, which makes them taste better.

  ORIGINS: Probably somewhere in Southeast Asia, though they have managed to spread across most of the world, probably in furniture, as they like to nest in the bottom drawers of filing cabinets and chests. Now you know why filing cabinets are so heavy.

  SIZE: Usually less than 5 centimetres, including the legs. They have small feet, and often wear heavy boots to stop them sinking in mud or butter, especially in winter. Some of them like to wear a dangerous goldfish wrapped around them like a scarf. The dangerous goldfish like this, because it stops them blowing away in the winter winds.

  UNUSUAL THINGS: Because they are so short, gutter otters like to bounce on things so they can get higher. Their weight means
that this is not often good for the things they bounce on—very fluffy dogs and cats are usually safe, but don’t count on it.

  IS A THREAT TO: Tall people. Being heavy and tiny, they sneak up on tall people and stamp on their feet, just to be nasty. They also like stamping on earthworms because they can eat them once they are flat. They have been known to flatten sensible cows by accident. They like stamping on ants, just because they can. Sometimes they jump up and down on tall people’s heads until they aren’t tall any more. If a gutter otter walks over sheet music, the people who use it later find they are playing flat.

  USES: Good for keeping flatworms under control, or taking revenge on tall people. They are also handy if you need to have a troll flattened.

  HATES: They hate being reminded that they are short, and they always have names that start with the sound ‘high’ — Hyacinth, Heidi, Hiram, Hiawatha, Hidehi and Hieronymus are all popular names, though one gutter otter who was good at climbing changed his name to Higher-Perches. One German intellectual gutter otter writes under the name Hibrau. He spends his time sitting in a saucer of flat beer and says that Lowenbrau is beneath him.

  LIKES: Grey fryers, who make one of their favourite meals, flatworms in bitter butter batter. They also like battering rams, who make the bitter butter batter better than anybody else.

  This monster is often hard to spot, but its traces, like footprints in the butter, smears on the floor, flattened pets and holes in the trampoline, all offer hints that the gutter otters have moved into your home. The telltale holes in the wall left by their tame battering rams also offer a subtle clue. The other dead give-away is that gutter otters like tongue twisters, so they always have a twisted tongue.

  These monsters are everywhere, but they are expert at not being seen, even when they are in full view. They trick us by planting their feet in the ground and freezing their position, so they give a very good impression of being just a bunch of old posts. You need to watch old posts out of the corner of your eye to see if any of them move—if they do, they are probably post impressionists.

  At one stage, a group of radical post impressionists tried imitating letters and parcels, but it was easier for the mails than for the femails, and they eventually died out. That just left the pole variety, but they had a problem of their own, because forgetful elephants were much larger then, and used to come up and rub against them, knocking them over, even though the post impressionists asked them, politely, not to do it.

  Ever since then, the post impressionists have travelled the world, trying to find a place that is free of forgetful elephants, but the forgetful elephants keep following them around and forgetting the promises they made.

  There was a famous post impressionist called A. Posteriori, who was a bit of a philosopher. He spent most of his life trying to work out how many angels could dance on the point of a post. When he learned that posts aren’t pointed, he invented Pointillism, and went around the world rough-hewing posts, so as to shape their ends.

  ORIGINS: They probably appeared first in Poland, where they learned to imitate Poles, and then extended their skills to imitating all sorts of posts. They may be related to the Schrödinger’s Cheshire cat, because you hardly ever see them walking around: they just fade out of view and then into view in another place while nobody is looking.

  SIZE: The very young ones are about the size of matchsticks, the largest ones are the size of power poles.

  UNUSUAL THINGS: They try to look like very old timber, because this attracts termites—their favourite food. They have about 50 eyes scattered over their bodies, which is why they can tell when nobody is watching them, but you will only be able to see the eyes if you squint very hard at a suspicious-looking post.

  IS A THREAT TO: Garden flowers. If you have a post impressionist in your front garden, watch it when the morning paper is delivered. The post impressionist will sway gently, and then suddenly lash out, so that the paper bounces off it and hits the flowers in the garden. Nobody knows why they do this, and the post impressionists refuse to talk about it, but they never treat any morning paper called the Post that way.

  USES: Because they attract and eat termites, post impressionists can be very useful if you have a wooden house. The only problem is that if they move on, the termite-attracting smell lasts for six months, so as soon as they leave, you get swarms of termites. It is better to keep the post impressionists permanently, and that means being nice to them.

  HATES: Chainsaws, axes, birds that do imitations of chainsaws, and dogs. Their biggest problem comes from post modernists, a group of monsters who specialise in digging up old posts and replacing them with new ones. There is nothing worse than being dug up when you are resting after a delicious meal of termites.

  LIKES: Post impressionists like ‘knock, knock’ jokes, but only if you don’t tap on them, because if you do, you will probably hit them in the eye.

  This monster is the only one that looks like a post and writes wooden poetry. Their political views are quite odd, and they enjoy forming splinter groups. Always look for tracks, because if a post has deep tracks near it, that means it is just an ordinary impressionist who can’t fade in and out. Of course, it might be a spaghetto that has learned to balance on its tail. You can never be sure!

  These monsters aren’t much on the scary scale. They are gentle and friendly and extremely polite. The sensible cow looks very much like a puny cow, and in fact it used to be called the puny cow until one day when a gentle mud monster got worried, and said this was a bit unkind to them. When the puny cows thought about it, they agreed, and changed their name, but mainly they did it to stop the nice mud monster carrying on and getting upset.

  The sensible cows are very sensible, because they chose to be as small as they are. Being small means there isn’t enough on one of them to get a steak, and they are too small for it to be worth milking them, so people leave them alone. There is just one problem: being small means it is very hard to see over things, and sometimes they have trouble getting over things as well.

  Sadly, they have even more trouble in seeing or getting over things if they have just been stepped on by a gutter otter. Come to think of it, they also have trouble getting over being stepped on by a gutter otter.

  Things that are better not said to a sensible cow: ‘I’ll be with you shortly’; or ‘That’s the long and the short of it’. After a gutter otter incident, never tell a sensible cow ‘Flattery will get you nowhere.’ And never mention pancakes or ironing!

  ORIGINS: These are just ordinary Holstein cows which went and stood out in the rain until they shrank. Now they are small, they get cold quickly, which makes their black parts go purple and their white parts go deep mauve violet.

  SIZE: About 2 centimetres long.

  UNUSUAL THINGS: They often use tiny pogo sticks to jump over things that get in their way and also to get out of the way of gutter otters, but these cows usually only come out at night, so you hardly ever see them. They are hopeless with stairs, ladders and climbing ropes.

  IS A THREAT TO: Cockroaches. Once upon a time, if they landed on a cockroach as they pogoed along, they would slip off and hurt themselves, but now they use specially spiky pogo sticks that go straight through the cockroaches. This is bad for the cockroaches, but good for the sensible cows.

  USES: Great for pest control, and you can teach them to do tricks like rolling over, playing dead and walking the slack rope. Unfortunately, they are shy, so they won’t work in a circus, and they are too small to be seen anyhow. They are too big for a flea circus.

  HATES: They get sad when people make jokes about their size, and they don’t like it when people tread on them. Careless gutter otters annoy them, because they don’t like being flat. They prefer to stay away from trolls. They get extremely unhappy whenever they hear people singing flat, and they really don’t like people who collect steam rollers or keep herds of gutter otters.

  LIKES: They enjoy trampolines, climbing trees and paragliding. A few of them have tr
ied ballooning, but they aren’t very keen on the idea. They will happily stay in a cage, so long as the bars are far enough apart to let them walk through while keeping gutter otters out. Their favourite music when they are cold is Mooed Indigo. To keep themselves from getting too cold, they wear little cloaks called capellas. When they go out to sing, they like to form a capella group. They feel very happy when they are looking at relief maps, they admire wrinkled skin, and they think that 3D movies and pup-up books are totally brilliant.

  This monster is like a very small black and white cow on a pogo stick, with a sweet smile. Nothing else is looks like a cow and sings while jumping up and down on a pogo stick, and nothing else makes cockroaches run in all directions.

  There is only one half of one of these in existence at any one time, on average. At least part of it knows whether it is happy or not, but this rare monster always grins, even when it is fading away.

  The Schrödinger’s Cheshire cat spends most of its life inside a locked and sealed box, where it eats nothing but rich fruitcake. But outside of the box, the cats seem to hate fruitcake, so maybe they don’t like being in a box. They usually get out when hopeful misguided copywrong pirates break into the box looking for books to destroy.

  The Schrödinger’s Cheshire cats were originally called Cheshire cheese cats, and they were so embarrassed by this that they came up with the trick of disappearing when anybody began to snicker at them. In the end, they went to a special court in the Appellation Mountains and got their name changed.

  The judge’s name was Schrödinger Flatt, and he agreed to a change, as long as they kept part of their old name and included part of his in their new name. If they were called Flatt cats, they thought sinking geese and gutter otters would want to tread on them, and trolls would want to roll over them, so they choose to be Schrödinger’s Cheshire cats.