The Cockatrice Boys

by Joan Aiken

  “No … oo…” said Mr. Mossready, a little uncertainly.

  Tom Flint pounced.

  “Ah hah! There was summat dicey? Not quite as it should be? You smelt cats, maybe—or heard birds a-tweeting?”

  “No, I didn’t. No, I did not. Nothing like that. But there was a queer voice…”

  Mr. Mossready wished more and more that he could get away from this annoying interruption and find a quiet place to eat his parsley sandwich and get a cup of something hot.

  “A parrot, maybe?” suggested Tom Flint. “Parrots can do funny tricks with their voices?”

  “No. No. Nothing like that,” Mr. Mossready repeated. “Just a voice. The radio, perhaps.”

  He scowled at the other man, waiting for him to say that since there was no mains electricity in Manchester, and batteries were not to be had, he could have heard no radio.

  “I tell you what I did see,” he suddenly—to his own amazement—found himself volunteering. “I saw a face, running along on legs. Right nasty, it looked.”

  “Ah. A face on legs.” Tom Flint greeted this statement without the slightest surprise. “So. Where was that, then?”

  “Up yonder.” Mr. Mossready waved to the staircase. “Outside Mrs. Monsoon’s place. Maybe it came with the woman who was calling on her.”

  “A face on legs … Did it have a collar?” Flint asked.

  “I saw none. Right nasty it was,” Mr. Mossready repeated. “Had a spiteful grin. Made me feel queer.”

  Tom Flint surveyed him.

  “What you need,” he said in an unexpected tone of friendly sympathy, “is a herbal doughnut and a mug of hot rhubarb wine. And I know just the place to go for that.”

  This seemed such an attractive programme that Mr. Mossready felt inclined to ignore his first mistrust of the man who suggested it.

  “That does sound champion,” he said. “Would it be far from here, though? I’ve another three calls to make in this area.”

  “Nay, not a step. Just round the corner. A gaffer I know has his own stall down by the Ship Canal. I’ll show you, just you come with me. He brews his own rhubarb wine—fresh-picked rhubarb that grows in the ruins of the town hall—I’ve had it many a time, and I can tell you, it’s better than tea!”

  “Tea!” sighed Mr. Mossready, following with docility as his companion led the way round the street corner and along a narrow alleyway between piles of rubble, and so down to the towpath where the canal ran greasily between huge ruined buildings.

  “There—d’ye see—along there?”

  Sure enough, Mr. Mossready did think he saw a makeshift stall, built from old bits of lath and galvanized iron. And behind its ramshackle counter a man was boiling a kettle over what looked like a Bunsen burner. The flame of the burner flickered between the stallholder and his customers; Mr. Mossready could see nothing of him but a vague misty shape.

  “Tansy tea or hot rhubarb punch?” he asked in a low creaking voice as they came alongside the counter.

  “Tea for me, punch for my mate,” Flint told him.

  Two thick china mugs were filled with steaming fluid.

  Mossready was preparing to take a sip when Flint stopped him.

  “Nay, man, that’s not the way. Inhale a grand sniff of the steam first. That will relax the coats of the stomach. Hold your nozzle right over—that’s the way—and breathe in, hard. Once, twice—three times…”

  Tom Flint and the shadowy figure behind the counter watched with calm interest as Mr. Mossready inhaled his third breath and began to stagger uncertainly across the towpath.

  “Feels like you can hear the music of the spheres a-whirling round your head, don’t it?” said Tom Flint in a quiet, solicitous tone, and he gave Mr. Mossready a sharp push between the shoulderblades which sent him plunging into the canal.

  Just before the waters closed over his head for ever, Mr. Mossready heard Tom Flint ask, in a pleading tone, “Did I do well, Master?”

  But what the answer was, if, indeed, one came, the warden did not hear.

  Chapter two

  The last recruit to the Cockatrice Corps was a drummer boy, Dakin Prestwich. When he told his mother that he had been accepted for the anti-monster corps she burst into floods of tears.

  “Oh, Dakin, you never! What d’you want to go and do that for? You must be out of your finitical mind!”

  “I’m sick of living in the strong room of Barclays Bank, Shepherd’s Bush,” said Dakin. “I want to see some daylight.”

  “You’ll be killed for sure! You’ll be crunched up by a Flying Hammerhead. Or stamped on by a Footmonster. Or the deadly Mirkindole will get you. And I shall be left all alone,” wept Mrs. Prestwich.

  “Except for Mrs. Monk, Mrs. Prateman, Miss Jeppardy, Frau Fischer, Fräulein Gross, Mr. Teal, and Mrs. Widsey,” pointed out Dakin. These were the other people with whom Dakin and his mother shared the strong room of the bank. Several of them had been very kind to him, lent him books to read and taught him German, but now he wanted a change.

  “You just don’t care about your poor old mother.”

  “Yes, I do, Ma. And I’ll be all right. They’re going to give us Snark glasses, and there’ll be radio advance warning on the train, and a ballista for firing red-hot missiles at the Mirkindole. I’ll come back safe and sound—you’ll see—and maybe I’ll be able to bring you a few dandelion leaves or a bit of wild spinach.”

  People were absolutely starved for greenery because they never dared to go into the open country. All the food came from tins.

  “Those Snark glasses are no use,” wailed Mrs. Prestwich. “They say you can only use them six times. After that you see the Snark through them and vanish away.”

  “I’ll be all right,” repeated Dakin. Then he hugged his mother and left, because he could see that no amount of argument would ever convince her.

  The troop train was waiting for its crew in a huge pillared hall underneath King’s Cross Station.

  The Cockatrice Belle, as it came to be called, had been constructed with tremendous care and enthusiasm. People were so happy to do anything that might rid the land of monsters that they had been prepared to work all hours of the day and night. Hundreds of willing helpers had toiled for weeks in relays; the train had been built from all the bits and pieces left over from buildings that had been smashed by the devouring invaders: mahogany from grand restaurants, brass from pubs, velvet from theatres. Everybody brought something. Fishermen brought hooks, old ladies brought scissors and needles, children brought paint boxes and marbles.

  The train was armour-plated in bronze, inlaid with gold stripes, and the windows were triple bullet-proof glass with Snark-proof shades that could be automatically lowered at the touch of a button in the operations coach. On the roof were the wind-vanes and a row of solar-energy panels, in case the sun ever shone, to supplement the stellar power. The wheels were steel with rubber suction tyres. Tanks of concentrated diesel bricks hung suspended beneath the train.

  Dakin Prestwich ran up to the uniformed sergeant who kept guard at the ticket gate. He saluted smartly.

  “Drummer-boy Prestwich reporting for duty, sir,” he said.

  “Ho!” snorted the sergeant, who was tall and stringy and red-faced. “I wonder why Colonel Clipspeak saw fit to recruit a little chitty-faced object like you, when there was plenty others to choose from?”

  “It’s because I play the drum real psychedelic,” said Dakin.

  “Speak when you’re spoke to! And you address me as Sergeant. Sergeant Bellswinger I am, but Sergeant’s enough for you.”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “You get along to the boot-car, that’s your station. Corporal Dwindle will issue you with uniform and tell you your duties. And don’t let me hear that drum,” added the Sergeant, scowling with great disfavour at Dakin’s enormous instrument. “Don’t let me hear that drum ever, unless orders comes as it’s to be sounded, or the Colonel will do his nut.”

  “How can I practise, then?” said Da
kin, dismayed.

  “None of your lip. Double along to the boot-car.”

  Sergeant Bellswinger turned to bark at a new group of recruits, or rookies, and Dakin went along to the far end of the train.

  Corporal Dwindle, a sad, scoop-faced man, issued Dakin with his uniform, which was dark brown, the colour of plain chocolate, with gold buttons.

  “And here’s a pair of Snark glasses, which have to be greased every day with Vaseline, and a compass, a walkie-talkie, and a liquid-air pistol,” said the corporal, handing Dakin these items. “Write your name on the receipt form here, please. I’ll be giving you instructions how to use the pistol; meantime, don’t go fooling about with it. You can stack your drum up there in the rack. Your duties are as follows: at seven ack emma every morning you take the colonel his early-morning tea from the galley—”

  “Where do I find the colonel?”

  “In his private coach, that’s past the table tennis car and before you get to the video van. After the colonel’s had his tea, you polish the boots of all officers and NCOs. Then you cleans the windows,” said the corporal, his eyes lighting with enthusiasm because he had once been a window-cleaner himself.

  “What? All of them?”

  “Every one. And I want to see them glitter.”

  “Every day I have to do that?”

  “Every blessed day. Visibility has to be kept at a maximum. When that’s done you takes the colonel and officers their mid-morning coffee.”

  “I reckon they won’t get their coffee till tea-time,” said Dakin, looking along the length of the train at the rows of glass panes.

  * * *

  There were twenty-two coaches and an observation platform on the Cockatrice Belle. During the two weeks’ training period that followed, before the Monster Brigade were allowed out on active service, Dakin learned the order of the cars by heart, backwards and forwards; every morning while he cleaned the windows he had to recite them to Corporal Dwindle.

  “Engine cab—arsenal—broom cupboard—ops room—men’s mess—galley—officers’ mess—officers’ quarters—video room—Colonel’s cabin—table tennis car—ten privates’ barracks—boot-car and the observation platform.”

  To help himself remember the order, Dakin took the initial letters E A B O M G O O V C T P P P P P P P P P P B and made a sentence from them: “Every agile boy outwits monsters. Grapple off, on very cold Tuesdays, Pytons, Peridexions, Pookas, seven Porcupines, and Basilisks.”

  The colonel’s car and officers’ rooms were handsomely furnished with Turkish carpets, mahogany couches, brass fittings, and potted palms. The men’s carriages were much plainer, with slatted bunks that had to be folded back in the daytime, and the men were crowded ten to a compartment, whereas the colonel had a whole bedsitter coach to himself with armchairs, bookshelves, and a grand piano. The officers slept on folding beds in their spacious parlour, but there were only five of them—a major, two captains, two lieutenants—so at least they were better off than the privates.

  “It doesn’t seem fair,” said Dakin to Corporal Dwindle, as he polished windows.

  “Nobody asked your opinion,” said Corporal Dwindle. But then he added, “Life ain’t fair, take it or leave it. Why should my missus have got swallowed by a Hammerhead? She never did nothing wrong her whole life—only watched telly and knitted four hundred and seventy-two pairs of socks. Life ain’t fair. You might as well get used to that.”

  Dakin went on polishing windows.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, up in Manchester, his cousin Sauna was leading a sad and suppressed existence. Polishing three hundred and twenty windows every day would have seemed a treat to her.

  * * *

  On the first morning of action, as soon as Ensign-Driver Catchpole blew the reveille on his engine whistle, Dakin shot out of his bunk in the boot-car, flung on his uniform, and dashed along the corridor to the galley, where he boiled a kettle on the brass hotplate and made a pot of tea for the colonel. He knew how, since he had often made tea for his mother, Mrs. Prateman, Miss Jeppardy, and the other people who lived in the Barclays Bank strong-room. Then he carried the tea on a tray to the colonel’s cabin, tapped on the door, opened it, and went smartly in.

  A brown face glared at him from under the royal-blue velvet counterpane—a face with glittering grey eyes, bristly white eyebrows, and long sweeping white moustaches.

  “And what in the name of the Pink Panjandrum brought you in?” snarled the colonel, putting in a single eyeglass.

  “Morning, sir. Drummer Dakin, sir, brought your tea, sir,” said Dakin, and set the cup on the mahogany bed-pedestal.

  After one sip, the colonel’s eyebrows almost glided over the top of his bald head.

  “You call this gnats’ bathwater tea? What did you make it with?”

  “Stewed dried grass, sir, like always.”

  Real tea had long since vanished from the British Isles.

  “Well, you can take it and tell the mess orderly to wash dishes in it. Or his feet. From now on I’ll make my own tea.”

  And the colonel pointed to an automatic tea-maker at the other side of his bed. It had a radio-controlled kettle which, just at this moment, blew out a puff of steam and then shot a neat jet of water into a small pot, while a bugle recording played “It’s great to get up in the morning.” From the pot floated a scent of brandy.

  “Blow me!” said Dakin, greatly impressed.

  “Neat, eh? Runs on batteries from the engine.” The colonel poured himself a cup of tar-coloured liquid. “Ahhhh! That’s better. Now run along, boy, and take my boots and polish them till you can see your teeth in them. And don’t bring me any more of that hogwash tea.”

  “No, sir, thank you, sir.”

  * * *

  At this time in Manchester Mrs. Florence Monsoon and her niece Sauna were, like the other inhabitants of the city, living on thistledown tea and (when they could get it) dandelion root porridge. And they were burning up Sauna’s old schoolbooks for fuel.

  “And it’ll be those next,” said Aunt Floss, casting a covetous look at Sauna’s twin teddybears.

  “Oh, no! Please!”

  “Well? What else have we got? You don’t have any dolls—do you?”

  “N-no,” said Sauna, trembling. “They got left behind in Newcastle—”

  Aunt Floss compressed her lips and continued to eye the bears.

  * * *

  After two weeks of training it was announced to the Cockatrice Corps that the train would go out on a trial run the next day.

  “Where are we going?” Dakin asked Corporal Dwindle, who was giving him instructions in how to clean his liquid-air pistol.

  “Manchester.”

  “Fancy!” said Dakin. “My Auntie Floss lives there. Or she did, before the Troubles began. O’ course, I dunno if she’s still alive now; she might have been et by a Hammerhead. After Dad died we stopped hearing from her. I went to Manchester once when I was a kid. It’s a big place, ennit? I remember tall buildings and lots of buses.”

  “No buses there now, I don’t suppose. And the people are all starving. That’s why we’re going—to take them supplies. There’s a big colony of Snarks all around Manchester—got the town surrounded. The people built a town wall and dug a moat, but they’re trapped inside. Been radioing for help. When they could raise a signal, that is.”

  “What provisions are we taking them?”

  “Tinned carrots.”

  “I think I’d just as soon starve,” said Dakin.

  “I’d as soon starve as eat the muck they serve us in the mess,” muttered Private Quillroy, stropping away at his Kelpie knife.

  Everybody was grumbling about the food served in the mess.

  “How are we supposed to fight Hammerheads and Shovel-tuskers on watery mash and goat soup?”

  “The bangers taste of minced mud.”

  “The tapioca’s nobbut ground up fibreglass.”

  “The wads are made of plasterboard.”

&nbs
p; “And lined with dental floss.”

  Still, despite complaints about the food, the whole troop were in high spirits when, for the first time, on the first of December, the Cockatrice Belle huffed and chuffed slowly backwards up the long ramp that led from the pillared chamber under King’s Cross. A military band on the platform played Tosti’s Goodbye. The Prime Minister, the Minister of Defence, the Royal Family, and a large tearful crowd were left behind, waving flags made of old tea-cloths. Ensign-Driver Catchpole joyously tooted his whistle and the great glittering train crept gingerly into real daylight at last. It was all garlanded in tinsel and hung with small red and green glass bells, because Christmas was only a few weeks away.

  “Coo!” breathed Dakin, blinking against the dazzle as he gazed out, but Sergeant Bellswinger roared over the intercom: “Snark glasses—at the double—in position!” and they all clapped their protective spectacles on their noses. Behind the train the defensive gate clanged down over the mouth of the tunnel; the engine unhitched and rolled up a side track to the front of the train. Then it rehitched itself, and the Cockatrice Belle was on her way.

  At first the landscape north of King’s Cross was a bit of a disappointment to Dakin. For sixty miles nothing could be seen but pink and yellow rubble, great dusty piles of smashed houses. Gradually these were replaced by snow-scattered country—very wild country, with clumps of scrubby trees and bramble thickets, and tangly three-metre hedges, and huge ragged weeds on the railway embankments. It was all quite silent, except for the mild regular noise of the train, chunketa-chunketa-chunk, chunk, manunka-chunk, as it ambled its way along the rusty rails.

  Occasionally the shriek of a monster could be heard. And among the bushes monsters of every kind could be seen, lurking, prowling, flapping, fighting each other, or just staring at the train with huge glassy eyes as it slipped by.