by Heide Goody
“– for hate’s sake, I –”
The lu’crik oyh jerked its head and swallowed. On the ground, Rod jabbed up with the pen. There was an electric fizz and a hiss of pain from the lu’crik oyh as it spasmed backwards into the canal and disappeared.
Junior realised she was panting.
“So, that crackpot who said canal monsters were eating cyclists?” she said.
“Aye. Might have been correct,” he conceded, “sound of a breeding female.”
He looked at the bicycles.
“At least we now know how to lure them in. Fancy a ride?”
“Ah, a classic Rod pick-up line. Unfortunately…” She nodded toward one of the bikes. A chunk of wheel had been clawed out, tyre, rim and spokes. “Bicycle for one,” she said.
Kathy Kaur drove a small red Italian car. Vivian approved of the size; economy and modesty were admirable traits. She did not approve of the colour or the leather interior; it was flashy and suggested lax morals and deep personal insecurity.
“Is this still part of the interview process?” asked Kathy.
“Why do you ask?” said Vivian.
“I’m suddenly having flashbacks to my test. Mirror, signal, manoeuvre.”
“You’re right about Birmingham,” said Cameron from the confines of the back seat. “I’m lost already.”
Kathy took a right at the traffic lights by the Sikh gurdwara and pulled up beside an archway into a tall red brick building.
“The Pen Museum,” she said, peering up at the sign on the wall. “I can honestly say I had no idea such a place even existed.”
Vivian unclipped her seatbelt and stepped out.
“It seems they’ll give you a grant for anything these days,” she said. “Pen museum here. A coffin works museum down towards St Paul’s Square.”
“A coffin museum?” said Cameron, squeezing out of the back seat.
“Too kooky for my tastes,” said Vivian.
“Coffins? Kooky?”
“Oh, I’m all for celebrating our industrial history but, just because something’s old, doesn’t mean it deserves a museum.” She straightened her jacket. The leather seats had put quite a crease in it. “Next challenge. We have a pen to find.”
Nina was about to investigate the noises inside the house when the investigation came to her. A Mammonite man wearing fewer clothes than was normally considered modest burst out of the patio doors, closely followed by a hungry female lu’crik oyh. Wounded and terrified he might have been but he still had the presence of mind to say to Nina as he ran past, “Who are you? This is private property, you know!”
Fixated on the tasty semi-naked man, the lu’crik oyh scuttled past Nina and over the mangled rotary washing line. Nina grabbed a loose length of trailing flex and pulled hard, drawing the lines taught and entangling the creature. It struggled and turned. Nina pulled again and the thing got itself tied up further, but it still struggled powerfully on – now dragging the entire contraption behind it.
Nina picked up the central pole and pulled against the aquatic demon. It was stronger than her but not smarter and almost immediately it was running in a circle with Nina as the pivoting centre. She leaned back and let the lu’crik oyh do all the work. Two swift rotations and then she let go: the thing, carried by its own momentum, ran straight into a trellis-covered brick wall. It collapsed in a heap of clothes line and smashed trellis, with perfect specimen roses scattered on top.
Nina caught her breath and thought that there must surely be an excellent kiss-off line for such an occasion. She had a thing that was half spider, half fish, a clothes line and a garden trellis. Witty puns should just be lining up in her mind.
“Just taking out the laundry? No. That’s one web you won’t get out of? No? Net?” She shook her head. “When I tell this in the pub later, I’ll have said something so cool.”
Senior, running for the bridge, found her path along the narrow spit of land blocked by a lu’crik oyh half in and half out of the water. She scissor-leaped over into a back garden and dashed through the broken fence.
The lu’crik oyh that had blocked her path was leaning into the garden and harassing a Mammonite couple who had taken cover in a brightly painted and entirely ostentatious gazebo. The Mammonite man, in whom fear had made his off-human countenance look even worse, waggled an ineffectual hand at the beast.
“Ivana! It’s ruined the clematis!”
“There will be words at the next Neighbourhood Watch meeting!” shrilled the female Mammonite. “There will be words!”
The lu’crik oyh, apparently confounded by the gazebo, heaved itself into the garden and slither-scurried towards Senior.
“Hell, no,” she muttered and took brief cover behind a gas barbecue on wheels.
“It’s going for the Broil King Super Gem, Ivana!” cried the man.
The lu’crik oyh mounted the barbecue to get at Senior. She reached aside, pulled a mass of green netting from a soft fruit bed and threw it over the creature. It could only be a diversion. Plastic netting might as well be tissue paper to this thing. It shook at the netting and worked its jaw with breathless grunts.
And then it froze, twitched, and gazed upward for a long second before its left eyeball exploded and a fat lump of wetness tumbled out onto the ground. The lu’crik oyh reared in agony and bucked like a fish on a hook. Then it turned, with no consideration for its surroundings, and rushed down the garden, dragging netting and barbecue behind it, over the wall and into the canal.
“It’s taken the Broil King Super Gem!” shouted the man. “We’ve not even had chance to use it yet!”
Senior simply stared. The loss seemed acceptable in the circumstances.
The wet blob of cloth at her feet shook itself like a dog, dislodging barely any of the slime that coated it.
“And I thought they smelled bad on the outside,” said Steve.
Rod had cycled off, up to the bridge and towards the village, with a half-formed plan to draw the lu’crik oyh to a central location. Junior had called the authorities and, above the fading squeak of Rod’s intermittent and fish-baiting braking, she thought she heard the distant approach of the first police helicopter.
In the opposite direction from which she’d come, Junior saw a slouched figure walking along the towpath. It was Jeffney Ray, totally drenched but unmistakeably Jeffney Ray. He was picking through a wad of wet banknotes and hadn’t seen her but the moment she stepped towards him, he looked up and ran.
Junior was struck by the déjà vu of the situation: a canal, him running, her chasing. It had not ended well last time but it looked like the fight had gone out of Jeffney now. He ran towards the distant bridge. There was someone on it. Nina. Junior waved and pointed but Jeffney had seen her too and cut off to the side through the woods.
Junior ran on. Nina came the other way, converging.
Leaving the incandescently miffed gazebo-dwellers to rant about what the lu’crik oyh had done to their garden, Senior stepped back onto the narrow canal edge and continued towards the bridge. She was momentarily distracted by the sight of her other self, running at full pelt in the other direction on the opposite path, but she was too slow to call out to her before she had gone.
“I prefer the other one to you,” said Steve the Destroyer conversationally.
Senior paid the slime-sodden doll in her pocket no mind.
“She’s not grumpy like you,” he said.
“She doesn’t have you making her jacket wetter than an otter’s pocket.”
Eventually, she reached the bridge to find Rod’s car parked at the brow, empty and doors open.
“Okay,” she said, nonplussed. “Where is everyone?”
“They’ve abandoned you, morsel!” sneered Steve. “None of them like you!”
“That’s very hurtful,” said Senior.
Steve the Destroyer cackled happily.
Nina was thirty seconds into the woods before it struck her that the undergrowth of lush ferns and sprawling bramble
s were particularly familiar. Some distance ahead between the trees, she could make out a regular silhouette pattern that might have been a security fence.
“The school’s over there,” she said.
“What school?”
“The Mammonite one.”
Morag cast about. “Where’s Jeffney Ray?”
“He’s a slippery vangru all right,” said Nina.
She led the way towards the path and then to the gap in the fence she had climbed through on Monday.
“What trees are these?” she said.
“Birch trees,” said Morag. “Why?”
“How do you old people know useless muda like that?”
“They’re trees. They’re everywhere. They’re kind of important.”
Nina snorted.
The Pen Museum was not overly busy and Vivian was, in that assessment, being very charitable. The arrival of Kathy Kaur, Cameron Barnes and herself had increased the occupancy of the tiny museum by three hundred percent. And the other person present was the current curator.
“Thursday afternoons are not our busiest time,” said the short moustachioed curator, “but that gives you all the more opportunity to explore the world of pens and pen production.”
“Yippee,” said Kathy.
The museum consisted of two rooms. The first reminded Vivian of the classrooms where boys were taught woodworking before the war. It was dominated by benches and vices and other pieces of mounted and well-greased equipment apparently essential for the production of pens. They hurried through to the second, much larger, room. Its windows were wide (to admit as much natural light as possible), high (to prevent anyone inside being distracted by the world beyond) and sealed shut. The place smelled of grease and wood. Dust angels hung motionless in the air. Apart from a TV screen playing a rolling presentation on pen manufacture, the room might not have changed for fifty or even a hundred and fifty years.
And then there were the pens.
“That’s a lot of pens,” said Kathy.
Vivian tutted. She despised statements of the obvious. But there were a lot of pens.
“A lot of nibs,” said Cameron. “Don’t you have any of the pen – ‘bodies’, is it?”
“That’s a common misconception,” said the curator in tones that suggested he was tired of people’s ignorance but delighted to correct it. “These are the pens. The word ‘pen’ refers to the metal piece used to write.”
“Oh.”
The walls were covered in pens. Thousands of pens were mounted on green felt, like butterflies. Thousands more crowded the shelves of glass display cases. Huge boards, pocket-sized sample boxes and folding cases for travelling salesmen held thousands more. There was an elaborate display of silver pens, and a cabinet of outsized pens for calligraphy or demonstration purposes. And not a drop of ink in sight.
“So many,” said Kathy.
“In the 1840s, Birmingham provided three quarters of the world’s pens,” said the curator. “This is but a small sample, I can assure you, and not all of it yet catalogued.
“And they’re all fountain pens,” said Cameron. “You don’t have any biros or –”
The curator’s considerable moustache fluttered as he blew out with annoyance. “The ballpoint is not a pen.”
“It’s an abomination?” suggested Cameron.
“It killed off the local pen industry nearly a hundred years ago, supplanting the divinely elegant dip pens and fountain pens.”
“Right,” said Cameron. “Pens good, biros bad. Got it.”
There was the ring of the front door of the museum opening.
“Oh, it’s bedlam here,” said the curator and with a very old-fashioned bob of his head, departed to see who it was.
“Which one’s the one we want?” said Kathy, scanning the exhibits.
“That’s the challenge,” said Vivian.
Cameron spread out his hands, palms up and intoned, “As vanir’gi finarl beraayh-kreeh!”
Nothing happened. Kathy gave him a look.
“Did you just try to cast ‘accio pen’?” said Kathy.
“Worth a shot,” said Cameron.
Vivian watched the two explore the room. Kathy appeared to be inspecting each pen nib in turn, one by one, second by second.
“Choose wisely,” she muttered. “For while the true pen brings everlasting life…”
Ray hunkered down at the base of the largest tree he could find to hide behind. He had two hundred in wet notes on him. It wasn’t enough. When he took his phone out of his pocket to check the time, water streamed out of the corner of the case. But it was too late. He knew it was too late.
He sniffed. He was cold and he was miserable. Those two slag bitches were somewhere nearby. He didn’t know who they were but they clearly had it in for him.
Bet they were bloody lesbians, he thought sourly.
His plans now? He could try to grab some cash somehow – rob a corner shop or something – and then throw himself on the mercy of the Black Barge. He could just stay away from canals from now on and Gas Street Basin in particular. They could hardly get him if he wasn’t around. Maybe he should just leave town, he thought, leave the country. He could go to Amsterdam. He’d heard the place was full of hot chicks just gagging for it. A stud like him could clean up in a town like that. Did they have canals in Amsterdam? He wasn’t sure.
Whatever. He needed to be away from here. Let these people clean their own shit up.
There was a rustle of undergrowth and the snap of dry wood. Ray looked round. A lu’crik oyh stood next to him, its huge head an arm’s length from his own. Its slick mouth was a quivering tube of sausagey pinks and greys. Down that throat he could see gill slits, daylight in the windows of its cold maw. The dripping mandibles twitched, ready to pull Ray in, work him through. His eyes flicked up. Ray saw no emotion in those silver eyes, no intelligence, no life to speak of.
Ray couldn’t run. He couldn’t speak. He had nothing. He was too scared to even pee himself.
The mandibles widened, curved fangs flexing to grip the sides of his head. The lu’crik oyh leaned in slowly, delicately.
A distant squeal went up. The lu’crik oyh pulled away at once, raised itself up on its front legs and looked away. There was another squeal and another. The sound of children playing, high-pitched and discordant. Did the lu’crik oyh think it was another female calling?
It was hooked. Ignoring Ray completely, the lu’crik oyh bounded over him and away.
Ray burst into tears.
Nina saw the big shape flash by through nearby trees.
“There!”
“Is it him?” said Morag.
“I really don’t think so…”
The shape flung itself over the fence and across the school playing fields. Nina dashed through the gap in the fence. The lu’crik oyh – its hybrid movement looked ridiculous in such an open space – wriggle-crawled towards the Mammonite students on the rear playground of Thatcher Academy.
There were children. Mammonite children, evil monster children from the suburbs of hell, but they were children nonetheless and that meant something.
Nina sprinted after the lu’crik oyh, screaming for anyone to listen.
The Mammonites were evil monsters from the suburbs of hell but most of them weren’t idiots. As soon as they saw the lu’crik oyh coming, they screamed and scattered. Unfortunately, the increase in noise drove the creature to run faster. The children fleeing in all directions drove it wild with indecision and it ran here and there, back and forth, not chasing any one individual and therefore catching none. It leapt over a stack of industrial rubbish bins, sending a handful of kids running from their hiding position, and then climbed up the side of a teaching building to explore an open window.
Nina stumbled to a stop in the playground. The schoolchildren had fled and the creature was about to find its own way inside. A school army cadet came around the corner, took up position with his rifle and fired at the lu’crik oyh, striking it
several times before it slithered through the window and out of sight.
“Bloody hell, kid,” said Nina. “Nice going.”
The boy sneered like she had just vomited on his shoes. “Don’t talk to me, human shaska.”
He ran off into the building in pursuit.
Morag finally caught up with Nina.
“What the hell?” she panted, pointed at the departing boy.
“Army cadets. They have a fully stocked armoury in the sports hall.” She gave it half a second’s thought. “They have a fully stocked armoury in the sports hall.”
Vivian had decided to let the candidates suffer for five minutes before she put them out of their misery. Kathy was still working her way through the first pen display case; Vivian had no idea what she expected to see. Cameron stood in the centre of the room, eyes closed and arms spread as though waiting for the answers to descend on him from above. None of it was particularly inspiring.
But, partway through the fourth minute, Cameron opened his eyes and said, “You know what we need.”
“Yes, Mr Barnes?” said Vivian.
“A Venislarn resonator. An apudam-rha piece.”
“Detection equipment?” said Kathy.
Vivian opened her purse and removed an arrow-shaped charm on a chain.
“Always useful,” she said, dangled it by the chain and watched it spin. As though misbalanced, the downward pointing tip of the arrow rose as it drifted round, pulling minutely in one direction. Vivian followed it across the room, toward the corner by Kathy.
“I was near,” said Kathy.
Vivian slowed, let the arrow pull at her, raised it up along the rows and then across. And then back. And then stopped.
Cameron and Kathy crowded in to look. The pen nib in the case was black, not a spooky and ominous black but the black of silver that had tarnish for centuries until only the tarnish remained. It was fat and sharply pointed. It had no other noteworthy features, no aura of importance.
“Is that it?” said Kathy.
