The Monster's Daughter

by Paul Gamble

  David held up his hands defensively. “Hey, don’t get offended. I’m sure even Santa Claus has to get his suit let out around the waist now and then.”

  “Ha!” the Tooth Fairy snorted, sensing an opportunity to regain the upper hand. “That’s where you’re wrong. You see, Santa doesn’t even wear a red suit. His business runs on a subcontractor franchise model. Other people wear the red suits. He got too fat to wear his suit years ago.”

  At that moment Jack figured out a way he might free himself from the Tooth Fairy’s grasp—just by asking a question. “Just how fat is Santa, then?”

  The Tooth Fairy cocked his head to one side as he tried to remember. “Well, it’s been a while since I last saw him.” He thought for a few seconds. Then he slipped the pincers back into his tutu and let go of Jack’s blazer——dropping him to the ground. The Tooth Fairy blew out his cheeks and held both his arms cupped in front of him to represent a bulging belly. “But back then he was about this fat.”

  Trudy saw that Jack had been set free. “Quick, run!” she yelled at him.

  But Jack wasn’t planning on running. Instead he dodged backward and grabbed the marker that had spilled out of his schoolbag. He held it out threateningly.

  Four pairs of eyes darted from one face to another, wondering who was going to speak next. In the end it was David who broke the tense silence. “Look, I know the Tooth Fairy’s famous and all, but I don’t think that this is the time to be asking him for an autograph.…”

  Jack popped the top off the marker with his thumb. “This isn’t for an autograph.…”

  The Tooth Fairy laughed. “So what are you going to do, then? Try and distract me with a game of Pictionary?”

  Jacked stared into the Tooth Fairy’s eyes and tried to look fearless. “This is a permanent marker.”

  “So?” The Tooth Fairy seemed unimpressed with Jack’s words.

  Jack didn’t move his gaze from the Tooth Fairy. “You can’t rub these off if they get on hard surfaces. And if you take another step, I’m going to color my teeth bright green.” Jack held the tip of the pen right in front of his central incisors. “Now if I color my teeth green, they won’t be any good for making into piano keys, will they? And I’m good at coloring in; I don’t even go over the lines.” Jack snarled, even though it was incredibly hard to be threatening when you were talking about coloring.

  “You’re bluffing. You’d never do that to your own teeth,” growled the Tooth Fairy.

  “If the choice is between having a set of green teeth and having a maniac in a tutu pulling them out with pliers, I know which one I’m choosing.”

  The Tooth Fairy lowered his pliers. “It looks like we have a standoff. But there won’t always be a permanent marker here to save you.” The Tooth Fairy sighed, turned, and walked away.

  * * *

  MINISTRY OF S.U.I.T.S HANDBOOK

  SANTA CLAUS®

  HIS BUSINESS MODEL

  Many people over the years have questioned how Santa Claus® can afford to give free toys to children across the entire world. The answer is merely a matter of economics.

  The truth is relatively simple. Santa runs a franchise business model. This means he is similar to Subway or McDonald’s. In the same way that not every clown you see is Ronald McDonald, not every Santa you see is the actual chief executive of the enormous panglobal Santa Corporation.

  But where are the profits to be made in giving out toys for free? Well, apart from the money that local franchisees make from hiring their services to shopping malls, Santa makes a huge amount of money from merchandise. Ten percent of the profit from every Santa Claus® ornament, doll, Christmas card, or wrapping paper you see goes directly into Santa Claus’s® pocket. And that’s without even thinking about how much he makes from licensing his image and allowing other people to play him in films, advertisements, and heartwarming holiday specials.

  The toys are only used as a good public-relations exercise to ensure that the public thinks well of him and wants to buy even more of his merchandise. If you doubt this, just wait until next Christmas when he plans to bring out his own fragrance line (CLauS … for the man who wants to smell of milk and cookies).

  Considering the billions of dollars he is making, there can be little doubt why Santa is always so jolly around Christmastime.

  NOTE TO HANDBOOK EDITOR: We’ll need to make sure that we send Santa Claus® his royalty payments for mentioning his name. His intellectual property lawyers may only be elves, but they are absolutely ferocious.

  * * *

  3

  YOUR DOOM IS SEALED12

  “So why did you think the aquarium would be a good place to hide?” Jack asked. Although they had outwitted the Tooth Fairy, Trudy had suggested that it wouldn’t have been wise to stay too close to the school. David had offered to stay on at the school and try to cover for their absence.

  “I like the aquarium,” Trudy snapped and walked on, refusing to say anything else.

  “I don’t have a problem with it either,” Jack muttered following, “but it sounds educational. If we’re going to get in trouble for missing school, I’d hate to think that we might accidentally learn something.”

  Trudy stopped in front of a tank in which a squid was propelling itself back and forth with its webbed tentacles. Its bulbous body was dark red in color, and a pair of red eyes gleamed out of the murky water.

  “Vampire squid,” said Trudy, pointing at the label on the tank. “Remind you of anyone?”

  Jack stared into the murky water at the shape slowly undulating through the water, and he realized what she meant. “Cthulhu!13 I mean, the skin looks a bit healthier, and the eyes should be green instead of red … but apart from that it’s a dead ringer. Do you think they’re related?”

  Trudy sighed. “I don’t think Cthulhu has any family.”

  “Everyone has family,” said Jack. “I mean, even Cthulhu has to have a mother, right?”

  Trudy looked so sad that Jack thought she was going to try to use The Speed. For a second he feared that she was going to hit his shoulder a hundred times in a second. Instead she just turned and walked away. Jack stood for a moment and gazed into the watery tank. The vampire squid floated all alone. Jack wondered if the squid was sad that it didn’t have any friends.14 The good thing about living underwater was that even if you were really sad, at least no one could tell if you were crying.

  As Trudy wandered through the aquarium, several of the employees nodded and smiled at her. Trudy tried to smile back at them, but smiling wasn’t something that Trudy frequently practiced, and the result was closer to a snarl.

  Jack was confused. Even adults didn’t smile at Trudy—she radiated a kind of standoffishness that made people uneasy. And on top of that, Trudy certainly never smiled back—she seemed to be on her best behavior, for some reason. So that was two things that Jack was confused about. Thinking about it, Jack was uncertain which of these was more confusing. So now he was confused about being confused.…

  Jack turned and saw that Trudy had wandered out to an open-air sanctuary where injured seals were nursed back to health. He hurried after her, not wanting to get left behind. The sanctuary contained a range of rather sad-looking seals sitting around a pool filled with rocks and inflatable toys. Some of the seals had little bandages around their flippers. The seal sanctuary had been dug into the ground. If a seal leaned against the concrete wall, it could just about reach the bottom of a Plexiglas barrier that surrounded the concrete pit. The barrier prevented the animals from escaping into the sea, which lay just beyond a narrow breakwater made of boulders.

  “Have you ever wondered what’s the point of aquariums?” asked Jack. “I mean, we don’t have zoos in the sea, so why do we have aquariums on the land?” Jack looked at the seals and wondered to himself why they even needed a seal sanctuary. None of the seals looked that badly injured. And even if they were, would they really need medical treatment or bandages? After all, anytime he got a cut his mother mer
ely told him to make sure that he washed it and kept it clean. The seals lived in the sea. Therefore, wouldn’t their cuts be as clean as they possibly could be?

  “You know you’re talking out loud, don’t you?” Trudy leaned over one of the Plexiglas barriers and reached down to pet a seal that was standing on its tail and leaning against the concrete side of the pit.

  It had a slick, healthy gray coat and eyes that looked like pools of oil, shining purple as the light gleamed off them.15

  “Hello, you,” Trudy said, kneeling down so she could look through the glass at the seal’s face. The seal seemed to be pointing frantically toward the sea. Trudy smiled and nodded. “Yes, you want to get out and be with your family, don’t you?”

  Jack left Trudy and walked over to where he thought the seal had been pointing. From Jack’s point of view, the seal hadn’t been indicating the sea, but rather a large rock that lay at the water’s edge.

  When he was a foot away from the rock, he heard voices speaking. He strained to hear them over the sound of the waves.

  “I’m sure that’s her.… Trudy. Put the plan into action.… I’ll return to the shop later with supplies.…”

  Jack slowly leaned around the rock and saw an aquarium employee talking to the oldest woman he had ever seen. The old woman had jet-black hair, green eyes, and skin that was so wrinkled she resembled a bulldog that had been crossed with a walnut. She was wearing a long black robe that had been embroidered with lines of silver.

  But why were they talking about Trudy? The voices had gone quiet, and Jack leaned forward to see if he could hear something more. As he did, his head collided with the aquarium employee, who was walking around the rock. “Hey you, be careful—you might fall into the water!” the employee snapped as he barged past.

  Jack smiled a fake apology and then peeped around the rock. He had a feeling that the old woman was more important than the employee. But she was gone. Jack turned around and looked back. The employee had gone back inside the building—and no one else was in view apart from Trudy.

  Where had the old woman gone? Jack looked up to the sky to check that she hadn’t flown off. It seemed unlikely that a human being could fly, but he wanted to make sure. And he’d seen stranger things in the last week, like an enormous steam-powered dinosaur for a start.

  The sky remained obstinately free of flying old women.

  “Hmm,” Jack mused to himself as he stared out to the sea. And that’s when he saw the old woman again—walking calmly into the waves. Jack’s eyes widened. She was up to her neck in the waves and didn’t appear to be stopping. Surely she would drown? Now only the top of her head was visible. And then … then nothing. Jack stumbled backward to where Trudy was kneeling down at the glass barrier, still talking to the seal.

  Trudy pointed at Jack. “This is Jack,” Trudy said. “He’s my friend.”

  The seal seemed to nod at this. Normally Jack would have been surprised that a seal seemed to understand what a person had said, but he felt it was less odd than an old woman who had just deliberately drowned herself.

  “Trudy, there’s something really strange going on here.”

  Trudy looked up from the seal. “What, you mean the way that this seal keeps rapping on the glass? I thought that was odd.” The seal was using its flipper to rap on the glass wall rhythmically. “I thought that maybe it was trying to tell us a knock-knock joke.”

  Trudy turned back to the seal. “Um, who’s there?” she asked.

  The seal rapped on the glass three times more, slowly, then finally three times rapidly.

  “If that was a knock-knock joke, then it was the worst that I’ve ever heard,” said Jack. “Anyway, I’ve got something more important to tell you.”

  Jack explained about hearing the voices mention Trudy’s name and the old woman walking into the sea. Trudy’s brow furrowed.

  “What do you think?”

  “Well, it isn’t that odd, them knowing my name; I come here all the time. But a woman walking to her death by drowning … that’s definitely worth asking some questions about.”

  Jack nodded eagerly. Asking questions was one of his favorite things. Trudy walked toward the main building as Jack trotted along behind her. This was turning out to be Jack’s second very strange week in a row.

  * * *

  MINISTRY OF S.U.I.T.S HANDBOOK

  SEALS

  TIME TRAVEL EXPERIMENTATION

  A Ministry scientist at one time theorized that the reason seals swim so fast is because they have flippers. She therefore wondered what would happen if she fitted a second set of plastic flippers on top of a seal’s natural flippers.

  This squared the seal’s swimming speed and had this been where the experiment ended then all would have been well. But the Ministry scientist added another set of artificial flippers, cubing its swimming speed. Which is basically a way of saying that if you multiply something fast by something fast it doesn’t just become twice as fast, it becomes super, extra fast. And if you do it again, then it becomes impossibly fast.

  Six sets of flippers later16 and the seal swam so fast that it accidentally opened a wormhole and traveled back in time to prehistoric days. Sadly, it traveled back to a period in time before modern-day seals existed.

  Without any of its own kind to start a family with, the seal ended up marrying a saber-toothed tiger. Their offspring are what we in the modern world call a walrus. (For a while people considered calling it a sea tiger but decided that would be too confusing as there already was a sea lion.)

  Many of you will be wondering why on earth a saber-toothed tiger would ever become romantically entangled with a seal. The answer as usual is simple. A saber-toothed tiger is essentially a large cat. If there’s one thing that cats love, it’s the smell of fish; therefore, a seal, which only eats (and therefore smells of) fish, is basically wearing the saber-toothed tiger equivalent of Chanel No. 5.

  This kind of thing happens in the Ministry all too often, and we must work to stop it. Many of you will wonder why, but the world is very unfair to the walrus. Seals think they look ridiculous with their unnecessarily large teeth and mock them mercilessly. Walruses tend to become depressed and comfort-eat, hence their large size.

  The only reasons seals get away with this bullying is because they look ridiculously cute. Almost everyone in the world prefers the way seals look compared to the poor obese walrus. The only recorded example of anyone preferring the walrus is the Tooth Fairy—mainly because of the enormous tusks. The walrus is the Tooth Fairy’s second-favorite aquatic animal.

  * * *

  4

  NON-FISHY SOUNDS

  Jack and Trudy were walking through the corridors of the aquarium again. Trudy’s head snapped left and right as she looked for an employee to start asking questions—yet there was no one in sight.

  “This is weird,” Jack murmured. “This place is deserted. Maybe we should get out of here—this is getting spooky.”

  “Come on, Jack, we’re Ministry operatives—we don’t scare easily.”

  “Really?” Jack asked. “Because in that case I need to go on some kind of a training course. I’ve been terrified for about five of the last seven days. And the rest of the time the only reason I wasn’t terrified was because I didn’t really understand what was going on.”

  Trudy sighed. “Jack, if there’s something going on at the aquarium, I need to know what it is.”

  Jack considered asking her why but decided against it when he saw her hand bunching into a fist.

  “Come on, Jack—we don’t run from anything.”17

  Jack thought a moment. “Well, okay, but in this case there’s nothing for us to actually run from.…”

  Trudy looked around the room and realized Jack was correct. “Oh, right. Yes.”

  They agreed that in the absence of anything else, they should go back to the Ministry and see if their mentor, Grey, knew anything about women walking straight into the sea.

  They quickly marched thro
ugh the aquarium and found themselves in the empty entrance hall. They were there just in time to see the aquarium employee from the seal exhibition locking the doors … from the outside.

  “Monday—early closing day,” the employee shouted through the glass doors.

  Jack wrinkled his brow. “Um, shouldn’t you be locking those doors with us on the outside of them? I mean, we aren’t fish—so we’ll get lonely in here by ourselves.”

  The employee just smiled. “Oh, don’t worry about that—someone’s coming along to keep you company.” The aquarium employee smiled and backed away from the door.

  “I don’t like the sound of this,” Jack said as he bravely hid behind Trudy. “We’re trapped in an aquarium alone. We’re going to get attacked by a shark.”

  Trudy regarded Jack with disdain. “I think we’ll be okay, Jack; one thing about sharks is that they’re very easy to outrun.”

  “Oh, right … yeah,” Jack agreed.

  “Mind you,” said Trudy, “one day they’ll evolve legs and that’ll mean two things.”

  “What?”

  “Well, firstly, it’ll pretty much be the end for the human race.”

  “And secondly?”

  “Well, secondly, it’ll mean that the next Sharknado film might actually make sense.”

  Jack was about to ask Trudy what she meant when they heard a clattering noise coming from the corridor where the fish tanks were.

  “That doesn’t sound like a fish,” Jack murmured.

  It wasn’t.

  * * *

  MINISTRY OF S.U.I.T.S HANDBOOK

  SHARKS

  WHY SHARKS ARE SO FEARED

  Sharks are described by marine biologists as the evil brothers of dolphins. Or at least that’s how they would be described if marine biologists were a bit more fun.

  People often make the mistake of thinking that sharks are considered ferocious creatures because they eat the occasional surfer in their ridiculous tie-dyed shorts. Of course this isn’t true. The real reason that sharks are considered scary is that they are one of the few sentient beings on Earth that are not terrified of the ruthless businessman known as the Tooth Fairy.