by Paul Gamble
The Misery stared at Jack. “How do you think they keep swimming pools from having algae growing in them?”
Jack shrugged his ignorance.
The Misery smiled. “They put chemicals in the water that stop things from growing. Which is why they have to have a shallow end at the pool—because if you swallow enough of it, you’ll stop growing forever.”
Jack wasn’t sure whether the Misery was joking or not, but made a promise to himself that the next time he went to swimming lessons he would be sure to keep his mouth clamped firmly shut.
The Misery looked around the room. “Okay, take a few minutes and look around the place and get your bearings—then we’ll start the training.” The Misery skipped off away from them. He moved lightly across the stones. Jack was surprised that he hadn’t chosen to wear a wet suit. Instead he wore his usual baggy black sweater with a white letter M on the front.
Trudy smiled to herself and jumped lightly from stone to stone. The physical activity seemed to distract her from thinking about her mother.
Jack struggled to stand up. He decided that he had probably already found the best stone to stand on and didn’t feel the need to leap to another.
He looked across the water. Cthulhu had floated onto the stone island and had just set up a small red-and-white-striped tent. Jack wondered if he lived inside it. Cthulhu sat on the ground in front of the tent, cross-legged. Jack was surprised when a dozen long, fibrous tentacles crept out from under the bottom of Cthulhu’s dark robe, snaked their way across the island, and disappeared under the tent’s bottom.
A few seconds later a range of puppets appeared in a small hole halfway up the tent. Jack realized what he was looking at. Cthulhu was giving himself a Punch and Judy show. Jack remembered Static with his sidekick Volty. The thought made him incredibly sad. He realized that both Static and Cthulhu shared something in common. They were so lonely that they had created imaginary puppet friends for themselves.
At that moment he heard a noise that sounded like an elephant58 bellowing and something grabbed his ankle, pulling him off the stone and into the freezing water below.
* * *
MINISTRY OF S.U.I.T.S HANDBOOK
THE WOOLLY MAMMOTH
WHY IT STILL EXISTS
Many people assume that the woolly mammoth became extinct. However, this would make no sense at all. After all, elephants currently exist and a mammoth was nothing more than an elephant wearing a furry sweater. Elephants would not simply cease to exist if Bill Gates used his money to set up a charitable foundation with the aim of ensuring that all elephants were wearing sweaters by 2020.
The truth is simple: Woolly mammoths and elephants are the same creatures. However, mammoths are the teenage version of the elephants when they decide to grow out a large, floppy fringe and have long hair.
This phase only lasts for a few years, which is why only the most dedicated naturalist will have observed a teenage, floppy-fringed elephant/mammoth in the wild. As an elephant/mammoth gets older, it becomes more conventional and decides to adopt the close-cut hairstyle of older elephants. (Just like a teenager getting a haircut in order to get his first Saturday job.)
Some elephants/mammoths would like to keep their longer hair, but these are rare—and even if they want to keep their hair, frequently it falls out through stress. Elephants never forget, which means they have an awful lot to worry about.
Suggesting that mammoths have died out is the equivalent of noting how many bald men there are around these days and suggesting that men with hair may be in danger of extinction.
* * *
32
TAKE MY BREATH AWAY
Jack’s entire body spasmed with the shock. One minute he was feeling sympathetic toward Cthulhu and Static. The next he was submerged in water. It wasn’t exactly the kind of thing that he had been expecting. He struggled to think. What had happened? What had grabbed his ankle? What was going to happen next? What had that noise been? He struggled to achieve any kind of rational thought. Unlike his previous dunking, which had just been unpleasant, this one was more confusing and shocking than anything else. He was so stunned that he forgot to even try and thrash his way to the surface.
The only thought in his head was What is going on? What is going on? What is going on?
Once more a pair of hands hauled Jack out of the water and made him grab the edge of a stone. Jack felt as if he should have been spluttering out mouthfuls of water. And yet for some reason he wasn’t. Jack was still very confused as to what had happened. He pulled himself up and sat on the stone.
Floating in the water at the foot of his stone was a smug-looking Misery.
“What’s going on here?” asked Jack.
The Misery didn’t answer. He looked to Jack’s left. Trudy was standing there glancing between a stopwatch in her hand and Jack. Something about Jack was confusing her.
“Do I have something dripping out of my nose?” asked Jack.
The Misery splashed the water at his feet and laughed. “No, Jack, and not only do you not have something coming out of your nose, but you don’t have anything going into it either.”
“Well, thanks … I think.” Jack looked around the room, hoping to see something that would explain what was going on.
The Misery hauled himself up onto one of the stones, his baggy sweater sopping wet. He kept his eyes fixed on Jack while he spoke to Trudy. “How long now?”
“Five and a half minutes,” Trudy answered.
“Impressive.” The Misery almost smiled. Then he leaned forward across the gap between his stone and Jack’s. He clapped his hands suddenly in front of Jack’s face. “BREATHE!”
Jack hadn’t stopped being stunned and confused, and the Misery’s actions confused him still further. And then he realized something. He had stopped breathing. Jack gasped suddenly and took several deep breaths.
“What happened? Was there a…? Did I just…?” Jack stuttered, frantically trying to remember when he had stopped breathing.
“Focus, Jack,” the Misery said. “If you become stunned again, you’ll stop breathing.”
Trudy was equally surprised. “Jack, you didn’t take a single breath after you got out of the water. And your head was underneath for minutes.”
“Is this magic water?” Jack asked, looking into the murky depths.
The Misery sadly shook his head. “Magic water? If you’re going to ask stupid and inane questions like that, why don’t you just become a talk-show host? It’s ordinary water.” The Misery considered for a moment. “Well, it’s mostly water. I mean, Cthulhu lives here and you may notice that there isn’t a toilet or even a bucket for that matter.”
Jack frowned and then realized what the Misery was suggesting. He spat a few times to try and clear his mouth of any water he had swallowed. “This is all very confusing. Why did I stop breathing?”
“That was your training. Have you ever heard the phrase ‘It took my breath away’?”
Trudy and Jack both agreed that they had. Jack thought back to how Trudy had seemed to stop breathing when she saw the amazingly beautiful marine biologist professor. Her breath had certainly been taken away then.
“You hear people saying things like that in pop songs. Or when they’re talking about some fancy painting in an art gallery,” Trudy suggested.
“Yeah, or if they’re shocked. My dad always says that when he hears how much mum spent on shoes; it shocks him so much that it takes his breath away.”
“And that’s what I just did to you, Jack—I shocked you so much I took your breath away.”
Jack laughed nervously. “But … no … I mean that’s just an expression. When people say ‘it took my breath away’ they don’t mean it literally.”
“Please stop talking rubbish, Jack. All expressions have a basis in fact. Otherwise people would just be talking nonsense all the time, wouldn’t they?” The Misery sighed. “Breathing is just a bad habit people have picked up over the years.”
“
Breathing is a bad habit?”
“Of course it is. It isn’t an essential thing that we have to do. Not like drinking water. If you don’t drink water you become dehydrated. You actually run out of water in your body. But that can’t happen with air. There’s lots of air in your body; you’re surrounded by air, so why would you need to breath a lot of the stuff in? We don’t need to breathe air in the same way that fish don’t need to drink water.”59
Jack was suspicious of this argument. “So why are you breathing, then?”
The Misery sneered at him. “Because I like having bad habits. Think about it—you breathe in and then you breathe out. Do you drink water and then spit it out straight away? What would be the point in that? Breathing is pointless.”
Trudy chimed in with a question. “But wait a minute—don’t we take in oxygen through our lungs? So don’t we keep at least part of the air inside our bodies?”
“Stuff and nonsense. You really think that every time you breathe in you’re keeping some oxygen inside? Think about it—if that were the case, then you’d be very slowly inflating yourself. After a lifetime of taking a little bit of oxygen in with each breath you’d be blown up to the size of a hot air balloon.”
That seemed to make sense to Jack; after all, if you kept eating cake, you’d swell up to an enormous size. If you kept drinking water, eventually you’d burst. And yet every moment of every day you were meant to be taking in more and more air and yet you didn’t get any larger.
“So breathing is a bad habit?”
“And it’s very addictive. Most people find it almost impossible to give up. So the only way to get people to stop doing it is to distract them. Like if you’re on a diet and you do things to take your mind off food because of how hungry you are.”
“So technically I could just stop breathing forever now?”
“Maybe, but I wouldn’t try it. You’ve been breathing all your life and it’s very addictive. Often when people stop breathing altogether they can die of shock.”
“So we can use this skill to go underwater without needing to breathe? Just like using The Speed?” asked Trudy.
The Misery shook his head. “This is a lot more difficult than using The Speed. It’s relatively easy to make yourself sad. It’s a lot harder to surprise yourself. It’s also vitally important to make sure you’re surprised and not panicked.”
“Why’s that?” asked Trudy.
“Well, a surprise or a shock takes your breath away, so you don’t need to breathe, but have you ever seen people panicking? They breathe really quickly—hyperventilate—which fills their lungs with water. So panicking actually makes things worse. That’s why people drown. If you fall in the water and you’re surprised it’ll be fine, but if you panic instead then you’re a goner.”
“And surprising yourself is the only way to take your breath away?” Jack wondered out loud.
“Obviously not,” snapped the Misery (a touch harshly, Jack felt). “If you can spontaneously fall in love, that also takes your breath away.”
Jack scratched his head. “Is it easy to fall in love?”
The Misery stared off into the distance; for a moment he seemed to forget that Jack and Trudy were even there. “It’s easy to fall in love. Almost impossible to get over it.” His voice trailed off into silence.
The room went completely silent. A single tear looked as if it was about to fall from the corner of the Misery’s eye. Trudy looked as if her heart was about to break. Jack, on the other hand, was considerably less sympathetic. He wished that people weren’t as complicated as this. He’d just found out what made Trudy so sad and suddenly it turned out that the Misery also had a tragedy in his past. Jack felt a little left out—his life was annoyingly tragedy-free.60
“Anyway, you losers can practice by yourselves for a while. I’ve got better things to do.” The Misery’s expression darkened—he was clearly embarrassed that he had shown any kind of vulnerability in front of Jack and Trudy.
Jack felt his curiosity taking hold of him. Maybe he could figure out a clever way to ask the Misery what he meant about falling in love. He thought carefully about framing a question. “Look, Misery, before you go, I was wondering what you meant by…”
Jack didn’t get any further with his question. The Misery reached forward and gave him a small push in the center of his chest. Jack’s arms windmilled and he fell backward into the water. The Misery streaked out of the room so fast that his slipstream nearly knocked Trudy from her stepping-stone.
Jack pulled himself up out of the water and back onto a stepping-stone again. “Why does everybody have to have a secret past?” he muttered as he hauled himself out of the water.
Trudy glared at him.
“It isn’t my fault! I’m just curious!” Jack observed.
Jack comforted himself with the thought that even if Trudy and the Misery had secrets in their past, at least some people were more straightforward. After all, Cthulhu was an evil interdimensional being who wished to destroy life and send all humanity into gibbering insanity. Jack felt fairly sure that Cthulhu wasn’t going to suddenly reveal a secret hidden motivation or mysterious backstory.
Jack looked across to where Cthulhu was sitting on his island. He had stopped playing with his hand puppets and was looking mournfully into a strange leather-bound book.
“OH, COME ON!” Jack shouted at no one in particular.
* * *
MINISTRY OF S.U.I.T.S HANDBOOK
FALLING IN LOVE
HOW EASY IT IS
Anyone who has ever listened to a pop song or watched a Hollywood movie will know that falling in love is easy. However, it used to be even easier in the olden days. Hundreds of years ago when everyone lived in a castle (or at least anyone that really mattered), the only thing you needed to do to fall in love was to put an ad in the local newspaper reading, “Young woman who has had hard life, but remains cheerful, kind, and pure of heart seeks Prince Charming for marriage and happily ever after. (Please note Duke Charmings and Earl Charmings need not apply.)”
If the world had remained like this, the algorithms that are used to make Internet dating sites function would be considerably more straightforward.
The evidence for this is quite clear in the historically based story of Cinderella. Even though Cinderella had met Prince Charming only once, she knew that he was the ideal man for her, and they lived happily ever after.
It is with some reluctance that we note that “ever after” in the case of Cinderella lasted for only three weeks. The part of the story that is often overlooked is that running in a single glass slipper is a health and safety nightmare. While she was running, the single slipper she was left with shattered, lacerating Cinderella’s foot. She was then forced to run along behind the mice that had been pulling her carriage. Her foot got infected with mouse poo and she died of septicemia weeks after marrying the prince.
It should be noted that the prince could have found Cinderella much sooner if only he had been bright enough to notice the fact that she was wearing glass shoes. Then instead of having to search the kingdom he could just have searched the client lists of the kingdom’s registered podiatrists.
The moral of this story is that if you are going to a dance wearing glass slippers, then it is almost always advisable to take a pair of flip-flops with you for the walk home.
* * *
33
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
Jack still didn’t have all the answers he wanted. “So when the Misery shocked me—how did he do that?”
Trudy laughed and pointed to a small black box that sat on one of the hexagonal stones. “Nothing special—he just used that MP3 player to make the bellowing noise. Then he jumped out of the water and grabbed your leg. You should have seen your face.”
Jack carefully leapt over to the stone where the MP3 player sat. “How about some music while we’re practicing?”
“I really wouldn’t do that if I were you. That belongs to the Misery and we don
’t have a good track record of looking after his property.”
Jack decided to ignore Trudy’s advice. “I’m not going to damage anything; I’m just going to play some music!” Jack skipped through the tracks on the MP3 player. Pressing the arrow keys, he moved it away from the sound effects list it was currently on and found listings for some albums.
“Most of these are really depressing songs.”
Trudy frowned. “It belongs to the Misery—what did you expect?”
Jack finally found a track he recognized and put it on. It was by one of those bands that wore so much dark clothing and makeup that when they played together, there was a distinct chance they would cause a singularity and collapse into a black hole.
A tinny sound echoed across the room. “Wait a minute—I’m going to pump the bass right up.”
Jack slipped as he twiddled a knob on the MP3 player, knocking it into the water. He froze in terror at what he had just done. A deep bass note echoed through the water.
Trudy was about to shout at Jack, but she was stopped by a piercing scream. It sounded like the shattering of a thousand panes of glass fed through a heavily distorted amplifier system. It was a sound of impossible, interdimensional evil in distress. Jack and Trudy both clapped their hands over their ears to try and shield themselves as much as possible. They both turned to see Cthulhu howling.
Cthulhu dropped the leather-bound book he had been looking at and bolted across his craggy island. With his robes billowing about him, he half hovered, half flew across the surface of the water.
Jack braced himself, ready for Cthulhu to hurtle into his body. However, Cthulhu wasn’t aiming at Jack but at the door, which he crashed through, splintering it into a thousand pieces. Slowly Cthulhu’s screams quietened as they echoed down the corridor outside.