UNUSUAL THINGS: If they are left out in the sun for too long, they go brown, not only on their skin, but all the way through. Over several days, they slowly return to the colour of white bread, and until they do, they glow in the dark.
is a Threat to: People who do things that go against the grain; people who spend far to much time wondering about the meaning of loaf; people who sell toasters.
USES: They will listen to crummy jokes, and never criticise the way you tell the jokes. The roll models are all well bred, with upper crust manners, so they are very useful in situations where etiquette needs to be taught.
HATES: Bread knives; tubs of butter; jars of honey and anything else which may be spread on them. They don’t even like sunscreen, which is very foolish of them, when you think about how they react to sunlight. Besides, a roll model covered in sunscreen wouldn’t taste very good, would it?
LIKES: They enjoy playing the crumhorn, though if there are any spare crumhorns around, some of the sillier role models put two on their head and hope that somebody will mistake them for a sensible cow. The only person who was ever fooled was Count Henry Blenkinsop and he used to eat sensible cows, so that was a bit of a bad move for those two roll models. Now you know how the sandwich was invented. When they are young and silly, roll models like going for a cycle in the woods. For some reason, there don’t seem to be many old and clever roll models to use the many abandoned unicycles that litter the woods.
This monster is the only one that quivers when you walk into a room and say ‘Sandwich!’, or ‘Breadknife!’ or say something is ‘the best thing since sliced bread’.
This is an underbed monster which has terrible indigestion because it eats raw mud alligators. At night, it rolls around under your bed, making a noise like a small thunderstorm. In fact, most of the time when you hear a thunderstorm at night, it is just a thunderguts that has recently eaten a mud alligator. Some of the time, it means that they are hungry, which makes their stomachs rumble. If there is no rumbling, there may still be a thunderguts there, but it may have eaten a cake of soap or a soap slurper.
Thunderguts are very unhappy about the problems they cause, so they try to be nice. They collect spare pins, safety pins and hairclips and make them into wire coathangers which they leave behind as a way of saying ‘sorry!’ If you have a thunderguts in your house, you can always find coathangers, but you can never find pins, hairclips, safety pins or other small metal bits.
They are roughly a ball shape, with up to 50 legs, which is why they once used to be called feetballs. The number varies, because mud alligators often break a few of their legs off while they are being hunted, but the legs just grow back again after a few weeks. This variation in leg numbers is one of the reasons why thunderguts are no good at marching or dancing. They are also not very good at sports other than football, and even there, most of the time, they end up being the ball. They have six eyes, neatly arranged in three pairs, around their equator.
An artistic thunderguts called Anonymous Bosch has been trying hard to get their name changed to something more sophisticated. The Swiss court that he has applied to, the Names of Zurich, has ruled that ‘Bond James Bond’, ‘Queen Elizabeth’ and ‘Dead Zeppelin’ are the same as, or too close to, names already in use.
ORIGINS: The thunderguts are believed to be the descendants of the original South Sea Bubble.
SIZE: On average, they are about the same size as a grapefruit, but you can tell them apart by the large mouth, just the right size for swallowing mud alligators, and by the rumbling noise.
UNUSUAL THINGS: According to a survey of 372 thunderguts, there is nothing unusual about them at all. They told us to ask the mud alligators and took us to a large mud pond where a number of mud alligators disagreed with this view, but they refused to come out of the mud to be counted. They said they knew the thunderguts were waiting for them.
IS A THREAT TO: They eat mud alligators, and the mud alligators say they definitely feel very threatened. They also eat soap, and if the soap slurpers are to be believed, the thunderguts will sometimes eat them as well, because they are easier to catch than a cake of soap.
USES: They find occasional employment in radio and television, working in the sound effects department. They are excellent at doing the sound of up to a dozen people walking in different shoes, all at once, and some of them can even imitate a flock of quarking ducks marching through a concrete tunnel. When sat on, they make a good train whistle sound, and they can also be used for thunder noises. Anonymous Bosch is famous for his imitation of the sound of a dozen tubas going into a mincing machine, but nobody has ever written this into a movie or radio script.
HATES: Drinking straw monsters. It’s bad enough having a stomach ache, but those rain noises really get up their noses, or would, if a thunderguts had a nose.
LIKES: They enjoy marching over steel plates behind an impish band, but they will settle for a drum band if there are at least three bass drummers.
This monster usually makes its presence known when the mud alligators begin disappearing, though the noise of thunderstorms is the main indication that you have thunderguts in the house. Treat all basketballs which have legs with suspicion, especially if they rumble.
These monsters are only dangerous to spaghetti, which like to shelter in railway tunnels when it is raining. The cunning drinking straw monster lies around on bedroom floors, looking just like a drinking straw, but when a spaghetto comes by, it makes rain noises. This alarms the spaghetto, which immediately takes shelter inside the ‘straw’. The ‘straw’ then swallows the spaghetto whole.
These monsters probably came from the laboratory of the evil Countess Agatha Blenkinsop, the mother of Count Henry Blenkinsop. She hated slurping noises more than anything because she believed (correctly) that all the slurping monsters hated her for inventing raspberry-flavoured soap. The drinking straw monster was supposed to just behave like a normal straw until the user slurped their drink, when it would try to attack them.
Countess Agatha made a mistake because she used DNA from trolls and forgetful elephants when she designed this monster. The monsters she created were very slow, and they could never remember which way they were supposed to be going. The Countess may have been evil and brilliant, but nobody ever claimed that she was smart. Her other known failures include:
The dachsodile: a cross between a dachshund and a crocodile. The result had claws and big teeth, but when it was told to attack, it rolled over and begged to have its tummy scratched.
The sabre-toothed caterpillar: she used essence of caterpillar tractor when she should have used essence of caterpillar while she was building it. The result is commonly seen today in the hollow-log industry.
The strangler fig: Countess Agatha hated people with bad table manners, and she thought a strangler fig would punish them. The trouble was that she did not know the difference between batfruits and fruitbats, so she ended up with a tree that only attacked other trees.
The less said about the disgraceful manners of her version of dogwood, the better!
ORIGINS: They were most probably created by Countess Agatha Blenkinsop, but we can’t be sure. The archives of the Blenkinsop family hold plans, with no scale, for something that could have been either a drinking straw monster, a device for straightening crumhorns or an artificial leg for roll models.
SIZE:The size of a standard drinking straw.
UNUSUAL THINGS: They are furry on the outside and smell faintly of curried wasabi that has been kept in an old sock for the last five years.
IS A THREAT TO: Spaghetti, starched satay sticks and any earthworms that have been bored stiff.
USES: Getting rid of stray spaghetti under your bed. There has been some research into using drinking straw monsters to hollow out limbs to make dijeridus and shelters for numbats, but most of the time, as soon as a log is hollowed, a molar mole moves in.
HATES: The sound of a drinking straw bass pipe being played, because it sounds just like the burp of
a very large and very hungry drinking straw monster wanting to defend its territory. There are instructions for making one of these.
LIKES: Thunderguts, because when you combine the rain noises of a drinking straw monster with the thunder of a thunderguts, the spaghetti become really frightened, so they are even easier to catch.
This monster is most easily spotted when you hear the sound of rain. If you look outside and the sky is blue, there will be some drinking straw monsters somewhere close by. Another clue comes when you find that the spaghetti jar keeps getting mysteriously low, or when you hear a drinking straw burping quietly. Treat all drinking straws that glow in the dark with suspicion.
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Trolls are so heavy that they break ordinary roads, so a lot of roads and bridges have special troll gates, where people give money to the troll collectors as a way of thanking them for keeping all the trolls off the road.
Think of a big rock on rollerblades. No, that’s not big enough. Much bigger. Keep going, OK, stop there: you are now imagining a very small troll that has been sick and unable to eat. Real trolls are a lot larger, bigger even than moby ducks.
Trolls do not come inside houses, as they are too big to get in through the door and so heavy they would break the floorboards. That would make the trolls feel very sad. Aside from any damage they do with their weight, they are completely harmless, and all those stories you hear are just yarns put out by the mean gruff billy goats.
Still, if trolls don’t set out to harm things, they still cause a lot of damage, so you need to know that trolls are not very bright. That means they are easy to confuse. If one is wandering around in your garden, go up to it with a spade in one hand and a shovel in the other, and ask it to take its pick. Or ask it if it can trill on a trellis.
ORIGINS: Nobody really knows where they came from. Except for the young ones who work as movie stunt doubles for hills, they are older than the hills, and much older than the stone age. The problem is that they talk very slowly unless they are sitting on a volcanic flow, so it is hard to get any information from them.
SIZE: No, bigger than that. Keep going. No, you’re still not close.
UNUSUAL THINGS: Trolls like to wear very colourful clothing, but they have a lumpy shape, so most of them just have a wraparound that is a bit like a frock, but they say it is called a trock. People who laugh at trolls say this is because it is the sort of frock a truck would wear. There are not many people who laugh at trolls, not any more.
IS A THREAT TO: People who laugh at them, but they only threaten them when they get their skates on, and then the laughing people stop laughing. They are bad for roads, gutter otters and sensible cows who do not get out of the way. Some sensible cows are not sensible enough.
USES: Trolls make the best paperweights known to science. The problem is that the papers they have been weighting down always seem to have turned into cardboard when the troll gets off. Most trolls work in the security industry, but some prefer working on road and airport construction. A few work as demolishers. Part eaters like to follow trolls around, because they know they are sure to find broken bits after a troll has passed by. Quarking ducks try to get trolls to cross bridges by getting behind them and singing. The trolls know that they can hide under bridges, so they usually refuse to break the bridges.
HATES: Pudding monsters. Trolls are the only monsters that are immune to a full pudding broadside from a squadron of pudding monsters. This really annoys the pudding monsters, so they keep trying, and the puddings keep shattering and bouncing off. The trolls don’t even feel the puddings, but they hate the puddingy smell. Also, microvalkyries often ride on top of trolls, waiting to grab some bits of pudding. The trolls don’t mind giving the microvalkyries a ride, but the microvalkyries insist on singing.
LIKES: Anything which does not sing, so long as it is not a pudding monster. This is probably why most sensible cows go around in a capella groups. The Eurovision Song Contest was started by the trolls and the goth ravens, so as to make everybody else hate songs like them.
This monster is the one that looks like a very big rock, has roller blades and wears a piece of colourful material.
You can find these monsters both on land and in the sea. They vary in size, appearance and the noises they make. About the only thing they have in common is that they all eat parts of things. If you ever wondered why spare parts for cars are so expensive, this is the monster responsible. Most spare parts places have lots of part eaters, always eating—for every part that is sold, three or four more are eaten by the part eaters.
When you see fruit on the tree that has had a small bite taken out of it, you know that a little part eater has been up in the tree, grazing on the fruit. If there is a collection of magazines in a binder, there will always be one part missing, and that is always the fault of a part eater as well.
To be fair, mechanical part eaters are usually ashamed of what they do, and when they see somebody putting something back together, they will often bring you some spare bits and pieces, just in case a less responsible part eater has taken some away. Most of the time, these extras don’t fit, so you end up with the thing back together and working, and a few parts over.
Part eaters like to say that they are better particle physicists than the quarking ducks. The quarking ducks get very cranky when they hear this, and demand that the part eaters show them the evidence. This is when the part eaters get a funny look on their faces and admit that they are the evidence.
ORIGINS: They come from many parts of the world.
SIZE: The giant part eater of the western deserts is absolutely huge, and never found inside houses, while the marine part eaters only live where there are sharks for them to bite pieces out of. The marine part eaters and the thunderguts are the only monsters that can pass the raw shark test.
UNUSUAL THINGS: When threatened, they go to pieces. Wave a putter over your head, shout ‘I’m going to putt you and put you in a pot, you poltroon of a part eater!’ and you can just watch them come apart; before you sweep up the bits. Scientists have recently discovered that the part eaters don’t mind going to pieces, because each of the bits regenerates to make a whole new part eater.
IS A THREAT TO: People smaller than them who practise alliteration, but only if the targets don’t have a putter, a pot, or a tin of beetroot. They hate beetroot.
USES: If you can find and tame a pet part eater, you could probably persuade it to eat the parts of your dinner that you don’t like. On the other hand, when was the last time that you found your most unfavourite vegetable disappearing off your plate while you weren’t looking? Maybe part eaters are more fussy than we think.
HATES: If you try to pat a pert pet part eater, and it spots you, it will spit and put pits in your hands from spite. They don’t like being patted, putted or put in pots. They also hate celery, because they say that wage slaves are usually beaten with a celery stick. Aside from beetroot, the part eaters really loathe morphing murphies, because potatoes are the only vegetables that speak to them politely, and they know that morphing murphies like eating potatoes, which is the sort of thing that can ruin a good conversation.
LIKES: They like parties, pâté, patty cakes and anything that comes apart. They like acting, and they are thrilled to bits if they get a good part.
This monster is so variable that it is almost impossible to describe, but the one thing that all breeds have in common is their habit of eating parts. They eat band parts, spare parts, even stage parts. Not many people know it, but most monologues were created when particularly hungry part eaters ate all of the parts in a play except one.
Throughout the book, we’ve given you some general hints about how to get monsters to go. Now here are some details about how to actually repel unwanted monsters.
Monsters hate word puzzles
I once had an obsession with words that end in the ‘-shun’ sound when it is not spelled ‘-tion’. I had to think of them all the time and one night, I noticed that when I made up a
list of such words, there were no monsters around all night. I tried a different word problem the next night, and suddenly realised that I had stumbled on a great discovery. Working word puzzles out in your head as you are going to sleep will get rid of monsters. Nobody knows why this is so. It works particularly well on harmful monsters, or monsters that would like to be harmful.
Any sort of word problem will move them on, so I have put together some of the ones that are easy to remember.
Being near somebody thinking through problems like these make monsters feel uncomfortable. Leaving lists of problems like this lying around will really annoy the monsters. It will make them run away and, if that is what you want, just leave this book open at this page. Leaving lists of answers is even worse. Here are some of the best problems to use.
Things a bit repulsive to monsters
• Simple one-syllable rhymes
(like play and say or boat, goat, moat and coat)
• Words that rhyme, but with different spellings
(like rule and school or play and they or easy and breezy)
• Single-word lists that start with different letters of the alphabet
(apple, box, cotton and so on)
• Lists of words or names that start with the same letter
(aim for 20 in the list)
• School spelling lists: make three copies and leave them under the bed. Monsters hate school, which is why you never see them at school.
Things causing severe pain to monsters
• Words that end in the ‘-shun’ sound when it is not spelled ‘-tion’
(like cushion and ocean)
• Short rhymes using friends’ names
(‘There was Bruce, whose shoe was loose’)
The Monster Maintenance Manual Page 14