The Iron Woman

by Ted Hughes

  ‘This is Mr Plotetzky!’ he cried. ‘We have to get him to water. Help me get him to the river.’

  A first-class idea! The four men from Global Cleanup grasped what was happening. ‘Explanations later!’ cried one. ‘Get Mr Wells to the river.’ They crushed back through the office doorway as a knot of enormous eels burst out from one office and rolled down the corridor, lashing tails.

  All over the building, staff were collapsing on to flippers and thrashing about, knocking over waste-paper baskets and filing cabinets.

  ‘To the river!’ was the cry. ‘Janice! Daphne! Grab a tail will you!’ ‘Jane, can you manage?’ ‘Help, Joanna, help!’

  Pandemonium is a poor word for that uproar and confusion. Glass shattered from doors, office furniture staggered and toppled, as slim secretaries struggled with man-sized barbels, carp, salmon and pike, tripping over the litter of empty shoes and tangling, empty trousers. The seals, giant frogs, colossal water beetles helped themselves, and so did the big eels.

  The factory’s entire office personnel lurched, flopped, thumped and slithered towards the exit. ‘To the river! To the river!’

  Like a mob bursting on to the pitch at the end of a football game, they burst out through the front of the office block.

  This was what Lucy had seen when she pointed.

  ‘I can’t believe it!’ screeched Primula. ‘Camera! Camera!’ And she began to yell and pant into her microphone as the mixed and struggling mass of giant fish and people and humping water beasts surged towards them.

  That was only the first wave. The second wave was much bigger – the factory workers. Here they came, the same mixture – men reeling under the weight of huge fish that had been their workmates.

  The river boiled as the heavy bodies flung themselves in, or slithered in, churning and swirling. The men who carried their friends did not escape. As soon as they had dumped their fishy fellow workers into the river, they simply fell in after them, changing in mid-air. The river was a heaving mass of clothes and great dorsal fins as the fish squirmed free.

  ‘Oh, get them as they change! Oh, get them half-man half-fish,’ screamed Primula to her cameraman. ‘Get their faces at the actual moment of change – what a stupendous sight! Never before! It’s a first! Look at that! Get that horror – oh, gorgeous! Get that terror in their eyes! Wonderful!’

  *

  But now it was beginning to dawn on those who watched all this that only the men had changed. Not a single woman had changed. The film crew, too, and the journalists, were all still as they had been, staring down at the dark, beaky faces, the great hard mouths opening and closing, the round astonished eyes. The giant water creatures could not come out. Nor did they want to go away. They bobbed at the river’s edge, along the concrete of the riverside walkway, lifting their heads out and even resting their chins on the concrete, gaping silently, sometimes gasping a dry croak, then rolling under to breathe, while the secretaries and canteen women and aroma chemists gazed down, and the scaly long bodies swirled and heaped in the foamy suds of the river.

  ‘If that water hurt the Iron Woman’s eyes,’ said Lucy, ‘think what it’s doing to theirs, and to their gills.’

  Even as she said that, a great catfish hurled itself into the air, shaking its head. Then a giant barbel. Then a sturgeon. Soon there were three or four fish in the air at any moment, shaking their gills and contorting their bodies, while eels rocketed out of the water and speared under again.

  ‘They’re trying to get away from the water,’ said Hogarth. ‘But they can’t.’

  ‘The river water’s poisoning them,’ cried Lucy to Primula. ‘You know what I told you. Look at them. It’s poisoning them.’

  ‘She’s right,’ cried Primula, ‘it’s a river of tortures! Just look at them. Get that!’

  Her cameraman needed no telling. The news cameras too were flashing non-stop. And the great bewildered fish reared up and plunged under, or lolled their heads along the concrete edge for as long as they could manage before they had to duck back under to breathe the poisonous water, unable to close their lidless eyes in the stinging chemicals.

  *

  If Primula had seen more than she ever thought possible, she was now in for the biggest shock of all.

  ‘Look, oh, look!’ she heard. Some woman cried the words. And Primula could tell, by the dreadful sound of disbelief in the voice, that something truly unthinkable was now coming. She twisted her head round. An arm was pointing. And then she saw up there, right above her – the Iron Woman.

  For a moment, all the women, the cameraman, the journalists stared. Then a strange sighing gasp went up.

  The Iron Woman looked awesome, so close, towering above them. And behind her, the Iron Man. Then everybody heard the thunderous words:

  ‘Stop the factory. Let the river run clean. Or all these creatures will die.’

  The booming and rumbling voice seemed to go right through their bodies.

  ‘She’s right,’ came a voice. ‘Stop the factory.’

  All these women suddenly realized there was something they could do. ‘Stop it now. Stop all that stuff going into the river. That’s a start!’

  But then came another shout, a man’s voice:

  ‘It can’t be done. I cannot allow that.’ Of all the men who had worked at the factory, one was still there in his human form. The Chief Engineer.

  ‘You’re the very one we want,’ a woman shouted. ‘You can show us how to stop it.’

  ‘I cannot allow it,’ he told them. He sounded very stern. ‘We simply cannot afford –’

  Women’s hands grabbed him by the throat, by the hair, by the arms. He was half carried and half dragged back into the factory. And those women didn’t waste any time. If he hadn’t told them exactly what to do, they would have torn him into ragged fragments, like a great doll.

  And so, within the hour, the whole factory came to a stop. All power was turned off. Everything closed down.

  ‘This will cost a fortune,’ wailed the Chief Engineer. ‘Half the plant will be ruined. You can’t just switch everything off, you know, and hope for the best.’

  ‘Oh yes we can,’ cried those women. ‘We’ve done it.’

  ‘I shall have to make a detailed report –’ he began.

  But before he got any further he flopped to the ground, with a huge pike’s head sticking out of his collar and his clothes wrapping around him like a baggy sack. His bright flat eyes jerked this way and that.

  ‘Into the river with him,’ came a cry. ‘Let him drink his poisons.’

  And so the women carried him to the river, and slid him out of his clothes into the weltering mass of streaming bodies, where he vanished with a loud whack of his broad tail.

  *

  Was that the end of it? It was not. Not by a long way.

  Not just all over the town, but all over the country men had turned into giant fish, giant newts, giant insect larvae, giant water creatures of some kind. Every man over eighteen years old was in water. And if their eighteenth birthday came on that day, down they flopped with the cake in their mouths.

  Wherever the women could not get their husbands into the rivers or reservoirs or ponds, they got them into baths and swimming pools. Nearly every bath in the land had a record-sized barbel, or pike, or some other man-sized fish in it. Or a huge water flea. Here and there it was a monster leech. Mr Wells the giant catfish was now in the swimming pool at his large new home. His two little sons spent their time digging worms and dropping them in, to see him sucking them up off the blue tiles with his great blunt mouth.

  The Prime Minister himself was a six-foot-long dragonfly larva, in the bath at Number Ten. His secretary came in every hour to tell him about the latest phone calls, but all he did was wave his feelers at her and push his strange mechanical jaws in and out. Lucy’s father was a giant newt. Her mother had collected him from the river in the car, and now he was in the bath. He had to curve his jagged, high-crested tail slightly, to fit in. She was f
eeding him with cat food. That was a big problem, feeding these creatures, especially those still in the rivers.

  Hogarth phoned home. His father was a shiny green frog, with a pulsing throat. He was down in the boggy rushes by the duckpond.

  *

  It was a national disaster, of course. The rest of the world was dumbfounded. The sights on their televisions were very hard to believe. At first, experts flew in from other countries to help keep things going. But the moment they stepped off their plane at the airport – down they flopped. The frogs could get back, and the seals, and even the carp if their clothes were well soaked and the flight was not too long. But the other fish had to stay in the nearest water. So that was the end of that. The women had to manage on their own.

  Very quickly, everything came to a stop. Electricity failed. So all computers went dead. All TVs went blank. Petrol ran out, the pumps at service stations no longer worked. Telephones went dead. There was no longer any question of Hogarth going home, unless he walked. All food in the shops was soon bought up, and all the candles.

  Lucy’s mother was distraught. ‘What’s going to happen?’ she cried. ‘We can’t live on worms and rainwater. And what will happen to your poor father?’

  Lucy and Hogarth felt desperate too. The whole thing had got out of hand. Soon it would be famine. Even if other countries dropped food by parachute. The Iron Woman surely didn’t want that.

  They climbed the hill, up through the wood. The Iron Woman had to help. She’d done it. Now she would have to undo it.

  ‘Maybe people have been taught a lesson,’ said Hogarth. ‘Maybe she’s done enough. Maybe she’ll change everybody back, now.’

  But the strangest things of all were still to come.

  6

  There they were, the two familiar figures, sitting facing each other among the stones and the great cedars on the hilltop. Lucy and Hogarth told them how things were. And how everything was getting worse by the minute. How people would soon be starving to death. But the great eyes in the great faces stared down at them without moving. Then the Iron Woman’s voice rumbled through them.

  ‘They still haven’t learned,’ it said. ‘The people will have to learn. And change.’

  ‘Oh, they have, they really have,’ cried Lucy. ‘People are in a terrible state.’

  ‘I shall know when they’ve changed,’ said the Iron Woman. ‘Something will happen. A certain thing will happen.’

  ‘What?’ asked Hogarth. ‘How shall we know what it is?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ said the Iron Woman. ‘Or maybe I should say, you will hear.’

  What did she mean?

  And at that very moment the Iron Man raised his huge finger.

  ‘There it is now.’

  Lucy and Hogarth listened. At first they could hear nothing. Then, without hearing anything in particular, they were hearing something. Like a shuddering in the air.

  The Iron Woman got to her feet. The Iron Man stood up beside her. The two of them stood very still, gazing out over the landscape, listening.

  ‘Isn’t it the sea?’

  Hogarth could hear it now, like a sighing groan. A groan, followed by a groan, followed by a groan. Each time louder. It was as if something were coming towards them across the country, groaning as it came. Whatever it is, thought Hogarth, it must be vast, almost like the sea.

  The Iron Woman raised her right arm and pointed.

  A low, webby cloud, almost like a dark mist, had spread over the land. Were the groans coming out of that cloudy mist? As they watched, the cloud seemed to be growing, thickening, bulging into lumps, like a sea of porridge. At the same time it was like nets tangling and untangling. It covered the town and the marsh. It heaped nearer. All the time the groans, like some weary creature groaning with every breath, grew louder, and nearer.

  They did not see, they could not see, what was happening beneath the cloud.

  *

  Lucy’s mother had just had a new shock. Every two hours or so she would go into the bathroom to have a few words with her husband. Not that he ever answered. There he lay, very black, along the bottom of the bath, perfectly still, until she tapped the bath’s edge. Then he seemed to wake up. With a slow half-wriggle he would lift himself off the bottom, and his bulging eyes would break the surface. Then he would lie, half-floating, his orange chin on the bath’s edge, gazing at her while she tried to cheer him up.

  It was hard for her, looking at those cold, round, gold-ringed eyes, to think that this was Charles, her husband.

  But this time, when she opened the door a gloomy fog billowed out in her face. It wasn’t smoke. Or at least it had no smell. It was a strangely clinging fog, like drifting webs. She brushed it from her face and her hand seemed to be draped with it for a moment. A peculiar clinging gloom, as dark as the smoke of burning tyres, so she could not see the opposite wall of the bathroom. It flowed out around her, past her into the house.

  Then she saw that it was rising in puffs from the bath, like a smoke signal. And now she saw the bubbles wobbling up from the mouth of the giant newt – or from her husband’s mouth, rather – where he lay, a jagged black shape against the white porcelain, resting lightly on his spread, rubbery fingers.

  She tapped the bath, but he ignored her. About every three seconds another fat bubble wobbled up and burst in a dark puff. Like a soft, silent shellburst of those weird, untangling fibres of gloom. She rolled back her sleeve, plunged her hand into the water, and rocked him gently. He still ignored her, only letting out three big bubbles together.

  Was he ill? Were these bubbles the beginning of the end? ‘Charles!’ she called. ‘Charles!’

  Then she almost screamed it: ‘Charles!’

  She lifted him up to the surface. It wasn’t difficult in the water. Before this, she had always been afraid to touch his bright orange, black-speckled underside, as if it might be poisonous. But she gave no thought to that now. She drew his chin over the bath’s edge. He rested there, his eyes fixed and glassy. Another bubble swelled slowly from his lips, till it popped with a tangling puff of gloom. Then, with a wriggle, he backed off and sank to the bottom. Another bubble came up.

  Whatever was going on, he seemed to be concentrating on his bubbles.

  She ran through the bedrooms, which were now dense with the strange gloom, and opened all the windows. She saw Mrs Wild, her neighbour across the street, doing the same thing, with the gloom billowing out around her from the opened windows. Mr Wild was an enormous freshwater shrimp, and he was in the bath too.

  ‘Is he bubbling?’ she called. ‘Charles is bubbling these funny dark bubbles.’

  ‘What next?’ cried Mrs Wild. ‘I think I’m going mad.’

  In every home it was the same. And in the swimming pools, the water tanks, the ponds, wherever the changed men lay they were burping those bubbles. And all over the land, that dark, ropy, webby fog was rising from the mouths of these dumb creatures – like tangling smokes from countless little campfires.

  It rose, forming that dark cloud, that eerie, gloomy cloud, which more and more looked like a vast net draped over the land. All day, the cloud went on thickening, while the Iron Woman and the Iron Man watched it. In the end, Lucy and Hogarth had to go home beneath it, still hearing that strange sighing groan – which seemed to come from everywhere. They sat for a long time in the bathroom, watching her father’s bubbles.

  *

  Next morning the house was clear of the gloom. Lucy’s father lay with his chin on the bath’s edge, waiting to be fed. His bubbling had stopped. And the groaning too, outside, had stopped.

  But the sky was dark, as for a heavy thunderstorm. A dense, blue-blackish webby cloud lay very low over everything. The air was still, not a bird moved.

  Once again, Lucy and Hogarth climbed through the woods, and came out above the cloud. The two giant figures stood exactly as they had last seen them.

  ‘What’s happening?’ cried Lucy as they came nearer. ‘What’s that funny cloud?’
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  But now they both saw that the eyes of the Iron Woman and the Iron Man were beaming red. Four powerful rays of red light, like laser beams, plunged down into the dark cloud spread out below.

  ‘Something’s going on,’ whispered Hogarth.

  They heard a cry – a sob. It was as loud and vast as the groans of yesterday, but now a sob. And now as Lucy and Hogarth watched they saw a bulge lumping up in the middle of the cloud, over the town. The bulge grew rounder, as if something were pushing an immense head up through it. Then they saw it had eyes. The eyes were so big that it was not really easy to see that they were eyes at all. And there were more than two. But now they had seen them, there was no mistaking them. Vast, mournful eyes. Two huge ones, but then, on either side of them, a slightly smaller one. And two more, slightly smaller again, on either side of those four. Then two more, smaller again. Eight in all. Or was it ten?

  And a mouth, a great cloudy cave of gaping mouth, slowly opened, as if it took a long breath. Then came another sob.

  The cloud seemed to be one gigantic head, a shapeless, ragged sort of head, like a jellyfish, or like an octopus – spreading out into a vast, knotted tangle of cloudy legs, covering the entire landscape. Or like an immense hairy spider, whose legs spread out across its even more immense web, that lay over the land.

  As they watched, the mouth opened wider. The cloud was now sobbing like a giant baby, with wide-open mouth – a mouth that opened wider and wider, squeezing the eyes shut. The four strong red beams from the eyes of the two iron giants plunged into the darkness of the gaping toad-like mouth of the great spider-cloud.

  The sobs were now incredibly loud. The spider-face had come closer. It seemed to be resting its chin on the treetops of the wood below. Its row of eyes opened again and gazed woefully down at the two giants, and they heard: