Sam: Loserville

I trod on the spot this morning – I wasn’t thinking, just hurrying down the stairs, grasping onto Alex’s hand. We were late for school and my foot hit the remains of the bloodstain without me even realising it.

I expected to feel something – a tremor in the air or some kind of a chill – anything that would mean a trace of that poor man was still there – but there was nothing. The only way I knew I’d stumbled on it was the plastic flowers I’d twisted into the grimy handrail to mark the spot.

I’d asked that kid upstairs about him. Nguyen I mean – he told me he was Vietnamese, that his father had been a mechanic before going into the Vietcong. That he could speak perfect English but refused to open his mouth as it felt like a betrayal. And that’s how he ended up here.

“Losers, that’s who ends up here,” Scratch had said.

“So you’re a loser now,” I’d joked. And when he didn’t answer I’d said “And I suppose I’m a loser too?”

His eyes narrowed a little bit and he said. “It’s the luck of the draw. And yes, you lost.”

I’d wanted to explain then about Si and the debts, the rent and the eviction. How the housing office wouldn’t put me anywhere else. And then I’d thought – why the hell should I explain it to this runty kid? And would he even understand if I did?

As I paused on the step, an elderly West Indian looking lady was staring at me. She wore a huge camel-colour overcoat and had her hair tied neatly in a colourful wrap – her eyes fixed on me accusingly and I flushed with guilt, stammering an apology.

“Did you know him?” I asked. “I’m sorry to ask this but, how did he die?”

“Like they all do,” she said. “He was eaten. Best you don’t know the details and just get your son out of here. This is not a good place.”

“Mum,” Alex had a tremor in his voice and I notice he hadn’t snaked his hand out of mine, which he usually does as soon as we’re out in public. “I think everyone in this place is nuts.”

Reasons why Ixbal is a moron number 5,779

Upstairs in the flat, everything looked normal, and smelled worse. Lamb makes Herlut gassy and a stinking miasma had filled the flat, so thick you could almost see it. Ixbal had tied a jolly red kerchief over his face to keep the worst of it out, and was gently stroking what passes for Herlut’s muzzle, crooning into one ragged, leathery ear.

“Oh eater of worlds, when the time comes, you will remember your true friend.”

“I think I’m going to vomit,” I said.

“It was I who brought you here to this place of refuge,” he continued, ignoring me. “I who protected you from the slimy social worker and I who brings you fresh meat every moon.”

“Fresh!” I made a choking sound.

“Go away, Scratch.”

“What, so you can keep pouring syrupy lies into Herlut’s ears?”

“The Great One likes to hear my voice,” Ixbal said. “It soothes him.”

I sucked my teeth like the local ruffians do, to indicate my contempt, but because I was in my real body, it came out as a buzzing sound.

Then I spotted a roll of paper held tightly in Ixabal’s veiny fist. Quick as a Speeder, I jumped onto his hand, jabbed it with one of the milder of my poisons. He roared with pain, dropped the paper in surprise, and glossy pages unfurled on the floor. A women’s magazine.

The power of sleep suggestion, it said. Oh, this was brilliant. I read out loud, a grin cracking my cheeks. “Deepen the bond you share with your man by whispering in his ear while he’s asleep. Remind him of all the good things you have together and when he wakes up he’ll feel closer to you without knowing why.”

I laughed so hard, I fell off the spine of the magazine and rolled onto the floor. Luckily I remembered to put out some of my sharpest spines just in time, as Ixbal tried to stamp on me.

“I have killed many for less,” he said.

It was time to use another of the local phrases. “Whatever. I’ll be in my room.”

I was half way up the wall to the air vent when I remembered I wanted to tell Ixbal about the ancient Speeder and Nguyen’s remains. But why should I share what I knew with such an out and out moron? I’d figure it out for myself.

Simon: feels like home

,

The whispering, fast things have drawn back. I can still feel them in the shadows, but they have gone. This can’t be good. I’ve spent my life in a tiny wooden box a few feet wide but something deep inside, the thing that the rabbits who went before me have learned, tells me that when small predators run, they run from the shadow of a hunter far bigger than they are.

Still, something about this big grey place makes me feel calm. I am in some kind of multi-level hutch that the humans have made for themselves. Unlike me, they do not use one corner as a toilet and keep the rest clean, nor do they have a nice pink lady who comes to change the straw after seven sleeps. It does not smell good and it teems with things which want to eat me, but I am not frightened, just cautious. I feel the need to climb upwards. I will travel slowly, by night, and I’ll have to find a bit of lettuce or something soon, but upwards I will go.

What the speeders are

It didn’t take me long to pick up the rabbit’s trail after I left the death-place, but what I couldn’t figure out was the way the speeders were acting.

Ever seem a vague blur at the corner of your eye, which turned out to be nothing? It wasn’t nothing, it was a speeder. Human eyes work at one speed, but speeders live their lives a hundred times faster. The result of this is that they’re voracious, vicious and very, very religious.

Think about it. A group of speeders breaks away from the main hive to hunt a rabbit. On the way three or four generations live and die. Don’t ask me what they eat on the way – bits of dirt, old skin, each other, but their minds are fixed on the rabbit. Each father tells his son: we’re here to hunt the rabbit. It is our purpose. It is what we do.

After two generations they become The Tribe Of The Rabbit. Songs are written, legends will tell of the chosen ones who will finally track down the creature, and the other chosen ones who will carry it back to the hive in triumph. Everything becomes a legend or a higher purpose with them, otherwise they wouldn’t get anything done.

And that was what was bothering me. The bloodstain – the speeders would have vacuumed that up in minutes, but they left it alone. And then there was Simon. The speeders knew about him, but the rabbit was still alive, I could smell him.

But that was nothing compared to what happened next. As I rounded the corner of the next flight of stairs, there was a speeder, sitting at the bottom.

My mind screamed with the wrongness of it all. Speeders don’t sit.

“What are you doing here?” I breathed, too stunned even to loathe the scaly noisome creature. Speeders don’t stop. They don’t know how, they even race around in their sleep

It looked up, oh-so-slowly and looking at its wizened, whiskery face, I realised the effort it must have taken. I saw a documentary on the television once about monks who sit still for years at the top of a mountain, contemplating a lotus flower or some such nonsense. This thing had spent – or was spending – it’s entire life sitting cross legged waiting for me.

It spoke – a jagged elongated voice.

“You… must… stop…”

And then it died.

Seconds later the body was gone, picked clean by the rest of the tribe. It’s life’s purpose a half-finished sentence.

Stop what? Stop hunting the rabbit? Stop Ixbal picking his nose in the bath? Stop Herlut eating the world? 

“You need to do better than that,” I called out to the Speeders around me. No response.

Reluctantly I turned and walked back up, past Sam’s door. This was a feeling I never thought I’d have, but strange times call for strange feelings – I actually wanted to talk to Ixbal. 

Speeders

Scratchyseesus, movesfastforaslower. Doesnotknow, doesnotknow. Thechosenonewilltellhim. Hopelieswithhim. Thechosenonewillprevail.

Sam: Child welfare

There’s something about that little boy that makes me want to feed him up, to take care of him. I don’t know if it’s that funny grown up way he talks, or those big wide eyes. But there’s something a bit hollow about the way he’d reacted to that bloodstain. I wondered what he did up there all day, him and his horrible old granddad. I also wanted to ask him why he wasn’t at school, but I didn’t want to scare him away by coming over all responsible adult.

“Having an inset day?” I asked casually.

“No,” he shrugged. “Haven’t had any insects at all – just some Rice Krispies this morning and a bit of dirt on the stairwell.”

Some kind of weird joke obviously. I tried again. “Do you go to the Crown Estate primary, or St Joseph’s?”

“Oh,” he said, the penny dropping. “School. I don’t need to go.” He pushed the subject aside, and started on a new tack. “Have you seen Simon yet?”

The name hits me like a punch again. It takes a millisecond to realise he’s talking about the rabbit, but during that tiny slice of time the hole’s opened up in my chest again, and I feel despair. He’s gone and here I am, in a block of flats where a mangled bloodstain doesn’t shock anyone. Where Alex was beaten up on his first day here, and where the only friendly face is nine years old going on seven hundred and twelve. The feeling crushes me but I push back hard and defiant. I won’t let him beat me this time.

I try to put my tea mug gently down on the coffee table but it clatters alarmingly. The kid notices but does not say anything. Instead, he promises to hunt Simon down for me. “If you don’t catch him soon the speeders will strip him bare,” he said. 

“The who? What are they some local gang?”

But he was staring towards the corner of the room, eyes narrowed. “Something like that,” he said.

Tea for two

I’ve never understood what people eat in this world. They ignore the raw goodness of a slab of bloody meat and the pleasure of stripping it from the bone with your teeth, instead they must always be mincing and mashing, sprinkling of spices, blending together. I am not saying it tastes bad – I enjoy Ixbal’s culinary experiments far more than I would ever tell him. But I’m saying, where’s the sense in it? How did they go from raw animal meat to this? Like tea – who sat down and thought: “I know what, I’ll take the leaf of this plant, dry it in the sun, grind it up, stick it in a little paper bag, then pour hot water on it, add the milk of a cow, whip the bag out and throw it away. Not sweet enough? Crush a plant that grows half way across the globe, dry up the juice, grind it all together and do unspeakable things to it until it becomes a kind of crystal. Then, if your tea’s not too cold by now, stick two spoonfuls in and give it a nice stir.”

Still, when the hooded non-virgin says. “I need a cuppa,” I know what she means. I notice her hand had closed around mine as we made our way up the stairs, away from the bloodstain that was Nguyen. Her fingers felt warm and soft and they seemed to anchor me to her, pulling me away from what we’ve just seen, making it feel different because we saw it together. I felt a flash of anger, and meant to snatch my hand away, but I didn’t. I just climbed beside her in silence.

“We’ve got the worst flat in the block,” she said. “Alex and I cleaned it from top to bottom, but it’s weird, it just feels wrong in this building somehow. How can you stand to live in this place”

I looked at her wonderingly. Could she tell that this world was wrong for me? I didn’t answer in case I gave anything else away. As we climbed higher she fell silent as well, her breathing getting harder. Until, at the floor below mine, she stopped. Three battered blue doors surrounded us, to the left, right and ahead, and I tensed. I found myself praying she’d turn to the right, or push her key into the lock of the door straight in front of her. Foolish. If she’s meant to die, she’s meant to die. Like Nguyen, like so many others. With agonising slowness, she turned left, and let herself in. She was in the apartment below ours. The death-place.

Inside, it had changed. A smell of fresh paint hit me in a wave, and something else too, vanilla candles. The mould had been scraped off the walls, hastily washed over with buckets of paint the colour of cream. The only thing that had not changed, that could not change, was the buckled curve of the ceiling where Herlut slept – she had fitted a smart blue light-shade in the centre of the room and it swung slightly as the monster shifted his position above. How could she not see what was wrong? Was it the same spell or curse which kept me looking like a boy, and kept Ixbal looking like a gentle old dodderer? Or was it something simpler, the pure human need I’ve seen many times, the instinct to ignore what you cannot change and to make the best of a bad situation? The waves of malice pushing down from Herlut’s underbelly were being fended off by a soap bubble of pure optimism.

The woman’s hand slipped from mine, and she strode towards the kitchen and snapped on the kettle. “Sugar?” she asked.

Unexpectedly I used a phrase I had heard on television once: “I’m sweet enough already.”

Recipe: Uncle Ixbal’s Scale Parasite Stir-Fry

Ingredients (serves two)
5 or 6 good-size scale parasites, dead
1 Tablespoon Virgin Olive Oil (very important that it’s virgin)
1 Jar Uncle Ben’s Sweet and Sour with Extra Pineapple Sauce
2 Carrots, chopped
1 Stick celery, sliced
Pinch of dried mouse entrails to taste

1: First take your scale parasites and pull them out of their carapace. You can do this with your bare hands but the job can be done more quickly using your eye gouger. A medium size eye gouger (the kind you’d use on dogs, swine or small children) works best.
2: Heat the virgin olive oil over a high heat in a small cauldron or large wok. When oil is slightly smoking, pop your parasites in, and stir.
3: When the grey goop around the parasites has evaporated and they’re starting to brown, add the carrots, celery and sauce. Keep stirring and cook for the amount of time recommended on the jar. At the last minute, before serving, add the entrails, crumbling them between your fingers, claws or tentacles to get a fine pepper-like powder.
4: Serve with brown rice. It’s better for you.

The scent of blood

After he has fed, Herlut sleeps. And this is a good time, a time we can relax. Ixbal and I take the opportunity to scrub the creature down, as almost nothing wakes him up when he is full. We fill buckets with hot water, bubbles created by the green slippery stuff that the Fairy puts in those squeezy bottles – I think it must be some kind of bile, but it foams up beautifully and leaves his hide squeaky clean. We scrape down his mottled scales, cleaning out the parasites which grow and gnaw between the gigantic armoured plates – there’s good eating on one of those, and afterwards when we’ve worked up an appetite, we throw them into a wok with some Uncle Ben’s cook-in sauce. We check the flat for speeders – they’ve infested the whole castle, and Herlut cannot abide having them near him. And if we have managed to find a real virgin – an event which grows rarer with each passing month – then we tidy up her things and figure out if there is anything worth selling. If we have used legs of lamb, we sweep up the plastic packets and rescue the wig to use it again next time.

Please do not expect me to be able to explain why Herlut can tell a non-virgin at 50 paces, but can be fooled by some legs of lamb taped together with a blonde wig perched jauntily on top. Our lord and master is a creature of mystery. And although he is sleeping, and the world is not swallowed whole, there is still no guarantee that the ruse has worked. Other things happen when Herlut goes hungry.

When we were done, Ixbal switched the TV on and settled down in front of Cash In The Attic with his special dusters and polish to shine up his axe collection until he could see his livid red cheeks in every blade. I watched him staring darkly at the face I’ve known and hated for so long. That broken nose, the dark eyes glaring from under knitted bear-like brows, the yellow-toothed snarl of a warrior in the prime of his life. Unlike me, Ixbal cannot accept that who he is cannot be seen outside. Back where we belong, those who see Ixbal run in terror (especially those of us who actually know him) but here, they speak to him in a loud, gentle voice and offer to make him a cup of tea. Watching him, lovingly running a J-cloth over his favourite carved steel pike, crooning to it as you would to a baby, made me homesick myself.

I clambered up the swirly-patterned wall, looking for my favourite perch just inside the air-vent by the ceiling, intending to follow Herlut’s example and catch some sleep too, but then I remembered the rabbit.

You know what it’s like. You’re trying to get on with something and then you remember there’s a chocolate bar in the fridge, and all you can think about is going to get that chocolate. Well, that’s how I felt about the rabbit. Every time I closed my eyes and tried to rest, I thought about those soft ears, that plump juicy body and that luxurious fluffy tail which would make me a perfect pillow.

“I’m popping to the corner shop,” I announced nonchalantly. “Would you like some cigarettes?”

Ixbal shook his head without even looking up. “Not hungry.”

He didn’t see me lift the dagger carefully and drag it to the front door. When I was over the threshold, and boy-shape again, I tucked it into my sock. There are things about this shape that I like – I miss the tiny poison hairs which grow all over my real body, and I miss being able to skitter up walls and squeeze myself through gaps the size of a pencil. And clothes. I hate clothes – they feel like shackles. But I like being warm-blooded and feeling the chill steel of the knife against my ankle.

The sun feels different against my skin, too. As I walked down the stairs, the light pushed through the murk of clouds and shone through the grimy safety windows. Warmth spread over my face, and for a moment I closed my eyes and gloried in the sensation, letting my hand grip the smooth plastic stair-rail. I worked a little of the dirt loose with a fingernail and popped it experimentally onto my tongue. It tasted strong and mysterious, but not good. Still, this was freedom. I was away from Ixbal, Herlut was sleeping, and prey was ahead of me. Keeping my eyes shut, I concentrated on blocking out the symphony of odours that crashed around me, and tried to isolate the hot-blooded, grassy, earthy smell of Simon. I wanted to find him quickly before Ixbal cottoned on to what I was doing, but I wanted the pleasure of the hunt, too. I wanted to feel the rabbit’s fear, his little body trembling under my hands. That, more than the sun, reminds me of the place where we belong.

I couldn’t single out the smell because there was a bigger blood-smell drifting up the stairwell. The familiar dread rose in my stomach, and my little boy legs quivered like reeds as I forced myself down the steps. There it was, a piece of tape tied half-heartedly to the stair-rail, blocking my way down to the fourth floor: POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS. I ducked under it, and saw a uniformed guard, chattering into her radio, trying not to look at the floor next to her. A sticky pool of russet-brown: rapidly drying blood. Ground into the stain were the tattered remains of a black leather jerkin, soaked and stiffening. All that was left. I should go back and tell Ixbal, not that there was anything we could do about it.

“Oh my God,” a voice, quiet at my side. I looked up and saw the non-virgin in the pink cowl. She was clutching a pink bag, and her fingers were twisting at the plastic strap, tighter and tighter – the tips had turned purple and blue, but she didn’t seem to notice, her eyes were fixed on the stain. “Do you know what happened?”

“His name was Nguyen,” I said, without thinking. I tried to ignore the things which flickered in my head – the boat, clinging to his frozen child next to him, coming ashore to forms and queues and detention centres. And then this.

“Oh my God,” she said again. “Did you know him? Was he, was he a friend of yours, Scratch?”

“I never heard of him before today.”

Rabbit's eye view

Bugger. Now where am I? It’s dark, but this is no burrow. It smells of humans, and I can see things flickering in the shadows. Why am I here? Oh yes, I am hiding from the ones with two faces who would eat me. But I can tell the flickering things are hunting me too. They wait – why?

Speeders

Oohrabbitrabbityummyhophop Quicklyfindyquickquick Creaturesleepscratchycome Eatnoweatgoodeatlaternoeat Quicklyquick

Sam: Over The Threshold

I managed to hide the tears until the funny old man and his grandson had left me, but when I got inside the flat, they burst out. Holding them in just seemed to make them bigger and louder and for a few moments all I could do was stand there, leaning against the cheap plywood door, clutching the stupid bloody standard lamp, taking in huge sobbing gasps of air like a two year old having a tantrum. I had thought that naming the rabbit after Si would take away the power his name had over me, but there was something about the old man’s words, however rude, that brought it all crashing back. Not a virgin? He’d said. Like I had wasted my life, thrown away something precious on Simon the Shagger.

And now here I was in this, this place. And he was gone. The bastard. The shagger.

Calm. Keep calm. I had to hold it together for my lovely boy. I pulled the sleeves of my hoodie up over my wrists and used the crinkly fabric to wipe my eyes dry and look around me. The flat was even worse than I’d imagined. Patches of frayed carpet clung to the concrete floor – in places it had worn away completely leaving black and rotting bits of underlay behind. The windows were silted up with ages worth of dust, a streak of green slime running down one of them. In the corner of the room it looked like someone had once made a fire with an old television set. And everywhere there was a strange, dank smell. Foul and earthy, not the sort of smell you’d expect at the top of a tower block, in the middle of a city.

But the strangest thing of all was the ceiling. It curved and bowed almost cartoonishly, as if there was a big lake of water on the floor above, about to burst through. In the centre of the room, a sad little pink lampshade hung like an outie belly-button, wires all exposed. Just then, another one of those huge rumbles came, shaking the cruddy floor underneath me. It felt closer now – I prayed to god that noise wasn’t coming from the boiler.

I couldn’t let myself think about it, or the sobs would come back. Instead I groped in my hoodie pocket for the reassuring square of my phone, my anchor to the world. I didn’t need to dial, the number for the housing authority was programmed into my phone’s memory now.

“Hello? Yes, my name’s Sam Hedley. No I can’t hold…” I sighed and waited for the familiar strains of Kenny G to fade, and the receptionist came back on the phone. “Yes that’s right, I was rehoused today. But you promised me the third floor, and switched it to the 18th at the last minute – and there’s something wrong with it.
“Well there’s this smell, and the ceiling’s funny. We can’t stay here.
“What do you mean nowhere else? I know it’s a Friday but… But this place…” No good, the tears were coming back, and a soon as the first sob gargled out of my throat I knew I’d lost the argument. The same old routine would start again – calling the council, sitting on hold, begging to be rehoused. Alex and I were stuck here.

This is all your fault, Si.

I pulled the kettle out from my bag and made my way through to the dilapidated remains of the kitchen, grinding my teeth together as I remembered the words of the housing officer – I suppose he thought it was a funny joke, that it would lighten the mood. “The 18th floor, eh? Ooh, welcome to the mile high club!”

The kid on the stairs

Twenty five legs of lamb. We'd seen the last of Ixbal’s Inca-passity Benny-fit for that month. I stole the trolley from the Land of Ice, too – there was no other way to get them back across the moat of steel in time. The guardians pursued me across the tarmac, but I was too quick for them, even in this heavy form. I flipped them the finger as I dragged my load into the underpass – they did not dare follow me in case I had friends with knives.

The trolley wheels froze when I took them out of the car park, and every step I took, every bump of the trolley’s static wheels on the stairs, I cursed this strange, stupid world. Why just the lamb's legs? What is wrong with the rest of the animal? Why did the castle's lifting boxes never work? Why couldn't I just fly? My eyes were wet suddenly and my breath came in big gulps. This is not where we belong. This is not where we belong. Mother of a motherless son, this is not where we belong.

A pair of arms blocked me as I struggled past the twelfth floor. A kid, his blue-rimmed eyes narrowed, staring at me. Gold chains weighed down his pudgy neck, each knuckle bore a flash of yellow metal. He looked a little older than the body I wore, one of those children who look fat, but who are actually all muscle, like a bull, like prime beef cattle. If only Herlut took boys, I thought. This child would be the perfect feast for him, even though he’d be picking jewellery out of his teeth for weeks after.

He looked me up and down, faintly wrinkling his nose.

“Is this the best that Edith Cavell House has to offer?” he asked, using that voice which bullies use when the aren’t really talking to you, just talking for your benefit. Unlike the rest of us, bullies are allowed to talk to themselves. Ixbal does it all the time. “This is going to be easier than I thought.”

For a couple of moments, we stared at each other. I know what he saw – a skinny nine year old boy with a bad haircut, clinging to a trolley full of frozen meat. I had big wide brown eyes, with a bruise under the left one where Ixbal had flipped an elastic band at me three days before. I have seen this face in the mirror many times. No matter how hard I try to look fierce and proud, the way I truly am, it always looks like it’s about to burst into tears.

But for once, this face, this useless body would be an advantage for me. He saw a victim, someone he could thump easily. Bullies who look upon a skinny boy do not see a heart of venom beating beneath. Deep inside me the part of me that he could not see bubbled up with glee.

He stared at me, then looked down at his hands as he balled them into fists, and smiled a slow, ugly smile. I would have liked to toy with him longer, to take out the frustrations of the last few years upon him, but I did not have time for this. I grabbed one of the legs of lamb, cold between my boy’s fingers, and rammed it hard into his face. It made a wonderful crunchy sound – the kid didn’t even have time to register surprise in his eyes before he crumpled to the floor.

I laughed a short, flat laugh, before hauling the trolley onwards. These people. They think they are so ruthless and so clever, with their muggings and their druggings, but they would not survive a day in the place where we belong.

When is a virgin not a virgin?

It was typical of Ixbal – he made me carry the lamp, and a large shopping bag of laundry besides, while he carried the box with the rabbit. He gripped it so hard the cardboard box buckled under his greedy touch. Inside, the rabbit fluttered and thumped against its prison, as if it could sense the fate Ixbal had planned for it. I could see him drooling at the thought of fresh meat, and I knew that once his hands were around that rabbit’s neck I was not likely to get even the smallest bone. Although, it has to be said, that just listening to the words which came out of his mouth was enough to take away my appetite completely. I think he believed he was charming the young virgin, but charm is not something which comes naturally to Ixbal. Squashing things, yes. Roaring with rage, often. Being cringe-inducingly creepy to Herlut, absolutely. But not charm.

“A rabbit, you say?” he oozed, taking one step at a time, to save his breath. “My, my, and are you saving it for a special occasion?”
“I’m sorry what?” she stuttered.
“It’s a pet, Ixbal,” I warned.
“Ah, of course, of course. A pet.” He looked at me significantly when he said the p-word. “It must be very entertaining. And does the vermin have a name?”

The virgin was staring at him, her jaw slightly open. I was torn – Ixbal was falling apart here, and as I cherish his every failure, part of me wanted to just stand back and watch. But if Herlut did not eat… The very thought made me shudder.

So it was up to me, I would have to act. I felt my instincts arouse, my body preparing for the attack. My veins tingled as just the right kind of venom travelled to the tips of my spines. I found myself grinning, gripping the shaft of the standard lamp that little bit harder with the tension of it. Any moment now, and I would be ready. Oh, the perfect feeling.

“His name’s Simon,” the virgin was saying. A gurgle of laughter came up through her throat, and her lips parted, showing a set of even white teeth. She put her hand up to cover her mouth, as if the sound was rude. “Simon the shagger, after my ex.”

I tried not to look at her, focused on pushing the poison through my body and getting ready to pounce. I prayed to Herlut and all his disciples that it did not fail me now. But then she looked over at me, and her face assumed that sugary patronising cast that people use when they address me here.

“We’re going to put a hutch on the balcony,” she said. “You can come and see him if you like, he’s dead tame and doesn’t mind being picked up. What’s your name, love?”

And then, in the space of a moment, the toxins seeped away, just when I needed them most. I wanted to grind them into her eyes, dust them into her lungs and leave her paralysed, force those glib words back into her mouth. But there were no spines, nowhere for the poisons to go, but straight back into my heart. “Scratch,” I said. “My name’s Scratch.”

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Seven hundred and twelve,” I replied.

She laughed again like a little bell tinkling. “You look pretty good for seven hundred and twelve,” she said. “’Fact, you look about the same age as my son Alex. He’s nine.”

Ixbal and I looked at each other in panic. A son?

“You said you weren’t married,” he stuttered. “Just now, you said you never got married. No husband. That's what you said.”

“Well no I’m not,” she put her hand on her hip, and her chin jutted out as she looked Ixbal square in the eye. Her voice rang with outrage. “But that was my choice. Why marry Simon the shagger? Alex and me are better off without him. And, what’s more it’s… it’s none of your business anyway.”

At that moment, another rumble shook the building, trembling through every girder. A light shower of concrete dust sprinkled onto us, and the low roar of Herlut’s hunger echoed down into the stairwell. The rabbit box slipped out of Ixbal’s fingers and broke open on the stairway. Simon hopped desperately away, showing the white of his tail as he dodged into the half-open lift door to hide. But Ixbal had bigger problems right now. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a purse of monies.

“Scratch my lad, get yourself down to the Land of Ice and buy every single leg of lamb you find there. We fooled him before that way, maybe we can do it again.”

I snatched the purse from his hand, and ran down the stairs as fast as my stupid fake nine-year-old legs would carry me.

Hunting for sacrifices

Once, there was a castle, in which a monster dwelt. It was not the usual kind of castle. Instead of turrets it had twisted staircases, instead of granite it was made of crumbling concrete. There was no moat outside, just a seething stream of stinking metal boxes, whirring around and around, keeping intruders out and keeping the castle’s scurrying servants inside.

The monster was a real monster though. Herlut was his name, and he spent most of his days curled into a ball on the 19th floor. Over the years Herlut had grown so large that he filled the rooms he lived in. Ixbal had knocked down the walls to create space, so that Herlut’s tail had room to thrash and writhe, and Herlut’s lithe, muscular arms had room to strike and smash against the walls. Herlut’s claws had cut deep ravines into the swirly brown wallpaper, and his low, rumbling roar shook the shower curtain in the bathroom and made Ixbal’s greying toothbrush tremble in the dirty glass where it sat. One bad day, it dislodged the cobwebs over the kitchen sink, which was most inconvenient, as I happened to be sleeping in them at the time.

The monster’s breath filled the flat, so that when you passed through the door, it was like walking into the thick fog of a rainforest – it smelt of earth, and rot, and sour coffee. Underneath the dead weight of his body, the concrete floor had sagged and buckled until it looked like a hammock.

Most of the time, Herlut slept, and although he thrashed and growled, and sometimes reached out to grab Ixbal by the throat, he was harmless enough. But when he was hungry, panic shivered down through the entire castle. That’s when Ixbal and I would leave the rooms we lived in and prowl the other floors, looking for virgins. The castle’s servants weren’t stupid, they kept their cardboard-light doors banged tightly against us.

By rights, this should not have stopped us. By rights, Ixbal should have been able to rip the doors from their hinges and prise the reluctant virgins out from inside like a clam from its shell, but when he tried, his banging sounded feeble and infirm. His great hairy hands looked yellowed, veiny and wrinkly against the doors.

And by rights, I should have been able to slip through the keyhole, cast my tiny spines into the eyes of the virgin’s protector and steal her away while he was blinded. But my feet felt heavy and glued to the floor, and my body seemed great and galumphing instead of springy and spry. But we tried every door, from the 19th floor to the one at the very bottom.

“Bring out your virgins,” Ixbal roared – the tendons of his neck stuck out and the vein on his temple bulged with rage. Spittle flew from his mouth and landed in bubbles on the peeling pink paint of the door. “The mighty Herlut, eater of stars, needs a sacrifice to appease his appetites, lest he lay waste to the whole puny world!”

“Eff off Grandad,” came a muffled voice from inside. It sounded bored and irritated rather than frightened. “I’ve called the police and I’ve called the nuthouse.”

Ixbal’s mighty shoulders sagged, and he stroked his beard dejectedly, twisting it in knots around his thick fingers. I could see his eyes rolling crazily in their sockets as he tried to work out what to do next.

“Herlut’s going to freak,” I said. “Ab-so-lutely freak.” I like using new words that I have overheard the servants use on the stairwell. And I especially like stating the obvious to Ixbal. It makes steam come out of his ears.

But then the rumble came, low and intense at first, shaking the windows loose, rattling the silver lifting-boxes in their shafts, trembling the lanterns in their sockets and singing through the air until it seemed like the whole castle vibrated with the growl of Herlut’s hunger. I felt a twist of fear in my guts. We were running out of time. Ever since we had been stuck in the castle, I had banked on being too small for him to bother eating, but if he were to wake now, and go hungry, he could take the whole building, and me with it. And Ixbal, too, of course, but I wasn’t especially worried about that.

“Oh, what manner of place is this?” Ixbal wailed, sinking to his knees in despair. “With servants who do not serve, who do not even fear their master? Where nobody will help their neighbour? Woe! Woe!”

“Too right,” a voice panted from the stairwell. We jumped and spun round to see a large brass standard lamp slowly climbing the stairs. “Lift… broken. Neighbours… hiding. Whole… building… collapsing… And what the hell is that bloody smell?”

The lampshade moved further up the stairs, and we saw that it was being held tight by a young human woman. She was wearing a pink cowl and jerkin, the same blue breeches that almost all the servants in the castle seemed to wear. She carried a box under her arm, with holes drilled into it – my sharp nose caught the scent of an animal, a prey animal. The lady’s eyes were dark and flashing, darting from my face – or what she thought was my face – to Ixbal’s. She was perfect, from the tips of her white lace-up slippers to the ends of her flyaway blonde hair – it is very important that virgins have blonde hair. Herlut seems to prefer it.

A slow grin spread over Ixbal’s face, his ragged lip pulled back, displaying his glittering, diamond-studded teeth. He actually seemed to drool. “Why madam,” he breathed. “You have been sorely mistreated.” And with that, I kid you not, he bowed.