Muddle and Win

by John Dickinson

He reached down with his finger and thumb, picked up the little imp by the scruff of his neck and held him at eye level. ‘You’re not busy, are you?’

  The position Muddlespot now occupied was like someone who had been caught on the hook of a giant construction crane and hoisted up about twenty storeys with the crane driver grinning madly at him from inside the cab. The soles of his feet tingled at the thought of the drop below. He had a strong feeling that what he said next would be very, very important. And that ‘Yes’ was definitely the wrong answer. And that ‘No’ was almost certainly wrong too. His hands still clutched his dustpan and brush. In the pan lay two-thirds of the dead fiend’s nostril (and also some of its contents). The nostril rocked, gently.

  ‘I’m clearing up the mess, Your Serenity,’ he squeaked.

  (That’s another of those little rules for Staying Alive in Pandemonium:

  . . . ALWAYS TELL THEM WHAT THEY ALREADY KNOW. KEEP TELLING IT. DON’T CHANGE YOUR STORY. WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T SAY ANYTHING THAT THEY MIGHT THINK IS INTERESTING . . .

  Muddlespot hadn’t been out of the palace much, but he’d learned from watching the mistakes of those who strayed into it. Mistake Number One being to attract the boss’s attention in the first place. Quite often, that was all it took.)

  ‘Muddlespot,’ purred Corozin in his most soothing tones. ‘How many times? It’s Ssse-rehnity. Like that. Slur it, E to E flat, just gracefully. You can do that, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Your Sere-e-enity!’ piped Muddlespot, who was born from a wart and had the musical ability to match.

  Corozin winced. ‘I think you said you weren’t busy, didn’t you?’

  ‘I’m just clearing up the—’

  ‘Oh, sssuper! I’m so glad you’re available. I have a job for you. Congratulations, Muddlespot. I’m going to give you your chance. Your big break.’

  ‘You’re . . . sending me up?’ said Muddlespot, like a comfortable headquarters clerk who has just been told of his transfer to a badly mauled rifle battalion camped out in the shell-holes where he is assured of honour, glory, death and frostbite.

  ‘Pressisely. On a mission of highest importance.’

  Muddlespot wilted. The nostril of his former colleague rolled off his pan and disappeared silently into the void beneath his feet.

  ‘I’m convinced you have the right qualities,’ said Corozin, releasing him. ‘Guards!’

  Muddlespot fell all the way to the brass floor, where, still being essentially wart-like, he bounced two or three times. When he had stopped doing that and had picked himself up, he found that the two knuckle-dragging fiends had re-entered the room.

  ‘Our new agent,’ came Corozin’s voice from on high. ‘For Mission Alpha.’

  The guards peered down at him. They were smaller than their master, but still a lot bigger than Muddlespot. They had fangs about as long as Muddlespot was tall. They had talons like iron stakes. Their eyes glowed hotly in their grey-black skin.

  ‘Muddlespot?!?’ cried one of them.

  ‘Oh, that’s a good one!’ guffawed the other. ‘That’s a good one, Your Serenity, that is!’

  ‘You mistake me,’ said Corozin, with just that slight drop in his voice that signalled instant danger. The guards stopped laughing at once. They stood to attention.

  ‘I’ve been watching our young friend for some time,’ Corozin said. He turned to the window, searching his mind for anything good that could be said about someone who was both a wart and a gobbet-raker. ‘He’s very, er, diligent. Obedient. That’s what we need . . .

  ‘Besides,’ he added, leaning out over the balcony and observing that the pile of heads, limbs, torsos and entrails of his former agents had grown remarkably since he had last looked at it. ‘Besides, for some reason we seem to be rather short of operatives at the moment. Unless one of you two would like to volunteer?’

  ‘Oh no, Your Serenity!’

  ‘We wouldn’t dream . . .’

  ‘Pressisely,’ said Corozin. ‘Take him away and prepare him.’

  ‘Er, Your Serenity?’ squeaked Muddlespot, as a guard scooped him up in one claw.

  ‘Thank you, Muddlespot. I look forward to your report of success on Mission Alpha . . .’

  ‘But Your Serenity . . .’

  Corozin flashed his most charming smile. ‘ . . . I really wouldn’t bother to report anything else.’

  ‘Come on, Muddlespot,’ growled the guard.

  They left their lord admiring himself in the mirror of brass. They ambled down long, sonorous brass corridors and under arches of brass that were decorated with shiny pointed teeth of brass. Muddlespot went with them. He didn’t have much choice. He was about the size of a squash-ball in their claws.

  Very like a squash-ball. They even bounced him a couple of times off the floor without thinking about it. He left nasty smudgy marks on the shiny brass carpet, which he would have to clean up later if he ever got a ‘later’ in which to do it.

  MUDDLESPOT PEERED OUT fearfully between the talons of the guards. His eyes had stopped rattling in his skull, but his knees were still knocking and his skin was covered in goose bumps. They were in a long, long torchlit corridor that was floored and walled with brass, and every inch of brass writhed with carvings. The carvings were exactly the same sort of thing that decorated the walls and ceilings of Corozin’s chamber – detailed, explicit and oh-so-very-humorous, if you found that kind of thing funny, which just at that moment Muddlespot didn’t at all. He wished the guards would stop sniggering. They made a noise like forks scraping on plates. The sound of it was giving him toothache.

  ‘Here we are, Muddlespot!’ they cried, ducking through a low doorway framed with yet more carved teeth. ‘Briefing room!’

  The briefing room was small and badly lit. There was very little free floor space, and most of it was taken up with a grille through which rose ill-smelling fumes and the sound of ominous glopping. The guards were very careful to walk around this when they entered.

  In one corner stood a standard No. 3 ‘Gobbelin’ Utility Furnace (an ageing but very reliable model). Stacked against it was a full set of pokers of various sizes, some of which were dull from under-use and some – plainly the guards’ favourites – were also dull, but in a rather suspicious way that suggested they might have been really smooth and shiny if it hadn’t been that the things they got used for tended to put a bit of a stain on them.

  On the other side of the furnace was a range of pincers, also arranged in order of size but missing the No. 7 from the set, because of that time when one of the guards had got it a little bit too white-hot and had then used a little too much force to extract whatever it was he had been extracting from the unfortunate person he had been entertaining at the time.

  There were three mangles of different grades, two of which were broken and pushed against a wall awaiting repair.

  There was the usual array of boots (the ones with spikes on the inside), thumbscrews, saws, nose hooks and entrail forks all piled up together. Many of these were stained, too.

  There were stains on the floor, on the walls, on the ceiling. Of course the guards could have got Muddlespot to come and wipe the stains away any time they wanted. But they didn’t. The stains added to the experience, they said. There was nothing like having a few stains to look at while you were being strapped down, they said. Just to let your imagination work a little before things really got started.

  It was a bit like having a cup of tea, they said. It helps the flavour if you don’t wash the pot.

  (That’s what they said. Really, it wasn’t like having a cup of tea at all.)

  Muddlespot wore the fixed expression of somebody who knows there’s only one way out. And it’s down the booby-trapped passage, across the snake pit, over the boiling oil and past the poisonous spider whose boot size was way bigger than his own. Whatever he did now, he just wasn’t going to make it.

  ‘Agent Muddlespot,’ intoned one of the guards. ‘The information you are about to receive is for your ears
only. It must never be revealed to anyone but the three of us and the boss himself. And we already know it, so don’t bother.’

  ‘And it’s better not to talk to the boss about it unless he asks you,’ muttered the other guard. ‘Just in case he gets funny about it.’

  (You will notice that neither of them used Corozin’s name. And by funny, of course, they meant . . . Ah, but you’ve understood that now, haven’t you?)

  They opened the furnace and plonked Muddlespot down in front of it. One of them busily worked the bellows until the dull red coals brightened to a white glare. The other produced a tub of evil-smelling powder, tipped a small amount of it into one hand, murmured some words and then spat upon it. He dipped a claw in it and drew signs in the air before the furnace. Lines of fire trailed from his finger like the light from a sparkler, turning from white-gold to green and then a dull purple. When he had finished, he murmured some more words and threw the remaining powder into the furnace. The flames huffed briefly and died again.

  ‘Give it a kick,’ said the guard on the bellows.

  The other guard grunted, picked up a particularly heavy-looking poker and went Whangngngg-gng-g!!! with it on the side of the furnace.

  Nothing happened, except that the poker bent.

  ‘Give it a—’ the first guard began again. But he was interrupted by a huff! from the flames. They grew brighter in some spots and darker in others. Muddlespot peered closely.

  It was almost as if pictures were forming in the furnace, but they were too fuzzy for him to see what they showed. Also, he had a feeling that they weren’t just pictures he was seeing. Some of them might have been eyes, looking back at him.

  ‘It needs tuning,’ said the first guard. ‘Give it—’

  Before he could finish, the pictures sharpened. Muddlespot saw that they were buildings – not the sort of buildings he knew in Pandemonium, but smaller ones; squat, plain and built (crazy!) with very little metal of any kind and no brass at all. He was looking at a row of houses in the place Up There. The place that some people called ‘Earth’.

  ‘That’s better,’ said one of his briefers. ‘Agent Muddlespot, have you ever seen this before?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then take a good look. Because this is it. This is Darlington Row. Corozin’s patch. Note the school and the corner shop . . .’

  ‘Key points,’ said his colleague.

  ‘ . . . And the houses down to the Green, where our turf ends and Trapezius’s lot take over.’

  (Trapezius was the owner of the next palace along on this level of Pandemonium. Between his staff and Corozin’s there existed the usual friendly rivalry that found its expression in back-stabbing, disembowelling and dunking each other in buckets of acid whenever there wasn’t anything better to do.)

  The scene reeled slowly past, as if the three of them were seeing out through the eyes of somebody who was standing on the street corner and looking obligingly up and down the road.

  ‘It’s average human stuff. Some good, some bad. Some downright virtuous. There’s no special potential. We have to graft hard for what we get.’

  ‘We win some, we lose some,’ said the other guard. ‘You know how it goes.’

  ‘Until lately, we’ve been able to make up our quota and Low Command hasn’t complained too much. But now there’s a problem.’

  ‘A big one.’

  Muddlespot’s skin tingled. Suddenly he understood why Corozin had been disappointed with so many of his agents of late. Something had been going wrong up on Earth. Somebody up there had been handing out defeat after defeat after defeat to all Corozin’s best and finest devils. They had gone up one after another, and one after another they had failed. The object of Mission Alpha was . . .

  The picture changed.

  ‘It’s Sally Jones,’ said the guard.

  THE BELL HAD gone. The school yard and the pavements outside the gates were teeming with young escapees. Sally was among them with her bag over one shoulder. It was a heavy bag, with a mountain of homework in it. She passed Ameena and Janey and Chris, who were swapping tunes on their mobiles.

  ‘Hi, Sally!’ they said to her.

  ‘Hi, guys!’

  ‘Seeya tomorrow.’

  ‘Yeah, seeya.’

  Ameena and Janey and Chris were each nearly six feet tall, and won tennis matches at county level and competed in the district high jump. Janey was also a showjumper and was seriously good at that too. Sally wasn’t one of the sporty set at Darlington High. But they all said ‘Hi’ to her because she was Sally.

  At the school gates Mrs Watkins, Head of Languages, gave her a wan smile. Mrs Watkins was still heartbroken because Sally had decided to drop Spanish at the start of Year 9. What she didn’t yet know was that Sally was planning to join the Japanese club she ran at lunch times as a way of making it up to her. (OK, it’d mean another language to learn, but so what? Japanese wasn’t going to be a problem for Sally.)

  On the pavement, Cassie Anderson-Higgs had draped herself languidly against a parking meter. ‘So I mean, like, pleeeeease!’ she yawned. ‘Not only was it a hamburger, but he’d got them to put mayo on it! So I told him – “Right, you’re dumped, jerkface. And by the way, you kiss like a fish.” Oh – hi, Sally!’

  ‘Oh – hi, Sally!’ called Viola and Carmela and Imogen Grey, looking round.

  Cassie and her group were the ‘14/18’ set at Darlington High. They weren’t just wannabe eighteen-year-olds. They were eighteen in every sense except the technical one involving the calendar. Including how they looked, where they went and what they drank when they got there. Cassie dumped six men a week. Viola was taking driving lessons. Their contempt for anyone else was Total. The attention they gave them was Nil. Except for Sally. They liked Sally.

  It was easy to like Sally. She had an open, uncomplicated face and she smiled a lot. Her forehead was large, her eyebrows were strong and her nose and chin were small, so that it looked as if she carried her head tilted slightly forward all the time. Her hair was dark, trimmed in a neat line over her eyes and to collar length at the back. She wasn’t a fashion leader, or follower. She wasn’t a sports hero. She wasn’t the centre of any of the social sets in her year, and she wasn’t ever going to be lead singer in the school band. What’s more, she was getting awesome grades in class without ever seeming to try. But nobody minded.

  Because if your phone was out of credit, you could borrow Sally’s. If you’d left your maths homework at school, you could call Sally and she would give you the questions. If you called her after 7 p.m., she could probably give you the answers too. Her allowance wasn’t great, but if you needed any of it, it was yours. She’d hear your lines for the school play. And when all was lost and the Head of Year was bearing down on you and your last alibi was blown, Sally would get you out of it. Somehow. Without even lying.

  If you needed to cry about anything, you could cry on Sally’s shoulder. She’d listen. Later you might realize that in fact she’d been in a screaming rush about something else, but she’d stopped for you and had got the something else done afterwards. She’d stop for anybody. Even for ex-Cassiemen who thought she might be able to get them back in with Cassie. (Some hope.)

  And she never lost it.

  Ever.

  Though it’s true that lately things had been changing a little, without Sally or anyone really noticing.

  For example, her relationship with her alarm clock wasn’t so good any more. Back in her first year at the school it had been her best friend. But over time, morning after morning, it had become more of an ‘Oh – you again?’ Soon it would descend through those same stages of Pain Toothgrindingly Irritating Formally Dumped that every Cassieman came to know. (Except that with Sally the process would take months. A Cassieman could get the lot in five minutes: Love Pain TI FD!)

  And then there was . . .

  ‘Oi! Sally! YOUR BOYFRIEND’S WAVING AT YOU!’

  . . . There was Billie, her non-identical twin sister, who ri
ght at this moment was walking no more than six feet behind her and still felt she had to sound off like a passenger ferry in fog. Sally looked round. (So did half the street.) But it turned out that the ‘boyfriend’ wasn’t Stevie, and it wasn’t Mac either. Too bad. Stevie and Mac were both ex-Cassiemen that Sally thought were actually quite nice.

  It was Charlie B, waving from the bus stop forty metres down Garrick Way. And now Sally had to choose between 1) not waving back at Charlie, and 2) letting every one of the four hundred schoolchildren, teachers, parents, motorists, pedestrians and pensioners within earshot of Billie think that Charlie B was indeed her boyfriend.

  She chose 2) and waved back.

  Charlie grinned, waved enthusiastically and then turned to his mates, who pounced on him at once about his suddenly discovered love life. Sally shrugged. They’d do their worst, but hey. Boys were no good at rumour.

  ‘I don’t see why you don’t dump him,’ complained Billie, trailing behind her down Darlington Row.

  ‘He’s not mine to dump,’ said Sally.

  ‘He’s fat! He gorges on chips. He eats the batter off the cod and leaves the fish! Cod are nearly extinct!’

  ‘They’re not extinct. They’re overfished. Hi, Mr Granger.’

  Mr Granger was one of Darlington Row’s army of pensioners. He was doddering along the pavement in the wake of his ancient terrier, which he had probably found mummified in the tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh at the turn of some century or other, and which hadn’t got any younger since. Mr Granger wore baggy leather shorts and knee-length socks and a hat that he touched when he spoke.

  ‘Hello, hello!’ he said, touching his hat. ‘Going home from school?’

  ‘No, we’ve just landed from Mars,’ said Billie, deadpan.

  ‘That’s right, Mr Granger,’ said Sally, meaning school, not Mars.

  ‘Jolly good!’

  ‘Darling Charlie!’ fluted Billie in a high voice, pursuing Sally on down the pavement. ‘That’s you. “Darling Charlie!” He’s a balloon! A great big squelching turnip! He doesn’t walk so much as waddle! I hope you wipe your lips after you kiss him because they’ll be all smeary with grease!’