The Song of the Quarkbeast

Shifting oaks

I dropped Tiger and the Mysterious X at Hereford Zoo. While disappointingly having neither elephants nor penguins, it was saved from ignominy by possessing several animals that were not created by evolution, but by magic. Back in the days of almost unbridled power, Super Grand Master Sorcerers would attempt to outdo one another in their creation of weird and wonderful beasts. Of the seventeen known ‘non-evolutionary’ creatures, only eight were still represented by live specimens. Of those, Hereford Zoo had an unprecedented four. They had the only captive breeding pair of Buzonji, which is a sort of six-legged okapi; two species of Shridloo, a desert and dessert – one being the edible variety. The only captive Tralfamosaur also had its home here, and was now in a more secure compound after it ate the last Beastcatcher. A Frazzle named Devlin completed the small collection – it was not just the only specimen living outside its natural habitat in the wetlands of Norfolk, but also the only one glad to be doing so. They used to have a Quarkbeast, but it kept on frightening people, so was removed from display.

‘Here’s some money for a taxi home,’ I said, ‘and remember to get a receipt – and don’t let the cabby charge you extra for X.’

Tiger assured me that he wouldn’t and asked for a sixpence for an ice cream. I bid him goodbye and then took the main road towards Colonel Bloch-Draine’s country estate at Holme Lacy.

‘So what’s an oversurge?’ asked Perkins as we drove out of Hereford.

‘The art of magic is all about channelling the wizidrical energy that swirls invisibly around us. It usually takes skill and concentration to gather and focus the required power, but in some instances the opposite can happen, and the wizidrical energy comes in too thick and fast to be used safely.’

‘Like an overflowing bath where you can’t switch off the taps or take the plug out?’

‘Something like that. It’s unpredictable so pretty useless, like the wasted heat in a steam engine, so what you have to do is redirect the crackle elsewhere, like a safety valve. It can be quite fun, apparently – spelling anything just to use up the power. Showers of toads, levitation – whatever takes your fancy.’

‘A sort of magic free lunch?’

‘Kind of, except you still have to fill out Form B1–7G. If the paperwork isn’t in order, the penalties are severe. The rules against illegal sorcery are quite fourteenth-century.’

‘They don’t think much of us, do they? Civilians, I mean.’

‘Let’s just say the relationship between the public and sorcerers has been strained ever since the whole Blix the Hideously Barbarous “world domination” episode. It was over two hundred years ago but memories are long when it comes to having one’s will drained away and made into an empty husk, suited only to mindlessly follow the bidding of your new master.’

‘I can see how that might not go down too well,’ he conceded, ‘but don’t worry: I won’t let you or Kazam down.’

There was quiet for a moment as we motored down the road.

‘Jenny?’

‘Yes?’

‘Have you considered my offer to go and see the Jimmy Nuttjob Stunt Show?’

I looked across at him.

‘Is this a date?’

‘Might be,’ he said, staring at his feet.

I said the first thing that came into my head.

‘I’m only sixteen. I’m too young for you.’

‘There’s only two years between us. And let’s be honest, you don’t act much like a sixteen-year-old, what with the responsibility and dealing with Blix and matters of ethics and whatnot.’

‘It’s a foundling thing,’ I told him. ‘You grow up quick when you have to fight every night with forty other girls for the only handkerchief in the orphanage.’

‘To blow your nose?’

‘To use as a pillow. I’m sorry to have to mention this but you’re going to have to be careful with . . . personal relationships. Rejected partners can sometimes get sniffy and wonder what they saw in you, and this can lead to accusations of beguiling. It’s not a custodial offence as it’s not provable, but the negative publicity is harmful, and there always remains the faint possibility of being hunted down by a crowd of angry and ignorant villagers, all holding torches aloft and eventually imprisoning you in a disused windmill which they set on fire.’

‘Worst-case scenario?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think I’m beguiling you?’

I looked across at him and smiled.

‘If you are, you’re not that good at it.’

‘Ah,’ he said, and lapsed into silence.

Holme Lacy was less than ten miles away, and we pulled into the imposing front entrance of the colonel’s residence a quarter of an hour later. Perkins looked nervously out of the window. It was his first gig. Up until now it had just been practice spells at Zambini Towers and a lot of classroom theory, and none of it to deal with surges.

I parked the car outside the colonel’s imposing eighteen-room mansionette. Lieutenant Colonel Sir Reginald George Stamford Bloch-Draine had been one of King Snodd’s most faithful military leaders, and had personally led a squadron of landships during the Fourth Troll Wars twelve years before.

The point of the Fourth War had been pretty much the same as in the first three: to push the Trolls back into the far north and teach them a lesson ‘once and for all’. To this end, the Ununited Kingdoms had put aside their differences and assembled one hundred and forty-seven landships and sent them on a frontal assault to ‘soften up’ the Trolls before the infantry invaded the following week. The landships had breached the first Troll wall at Stirling and arrived at the second Troll wall eighteen hours later. They reportedly opened the Troll gates, and then – nothing. All the radios went dead. Faced with uncertainty and the possible loss of the landships, the generals decided to instigate the ever popular ‘let’s panic’ plan and ordered the infantry to attack.

Of the quarter of a million men and women who were lost or eaten during the twenty-six-minute war that followed, there had been only nine survivors. Colonel Bloch-Draine was one of them, saved by an unavoidable dentists’ appointment that had him away from his landship at the crucial moment of advance. He retired soon after to devote his time to killing and mounting rare creatures before they went extinct. He had recently started collecting trees and saw no reason why it shouldn’t be exactly the same as collecting stuffed animals: lots of swapping and putting them in alphabetical groups. Clearly, moving trees around his estate was not something he could do on his own, and that was the reason Kazam had been employed.

Patrick of Ludlow was waiting for us outside the colonel’s mansionette.

‘Apologies for calling you out, Miss Strange,’ he said, wringing his hands nervously as we got out of the car, ‘but things aren’t as they should be.’

‘No problem,’ I said soothingly, ‘you and me and Perkins will sort it out.’

Patrick was our Heavy Lifter. He could levitate up to seven tons when humidity was low and he was feeling good, which was more often these days as his six-ounce-a-day marzipan habit was now well behind him. He was a simple soul, but kindly and gentle despite his large size and misshapen appearance. Like most Heavy Lifters he had muscles where he shouldn’t – grouped around his ankles, wrists, toes, fingers and the back of his head. His hand looked like a boiled ham with fingertips stuck on randomly, and the muscles on the back of his head gave him a fearful apearance. He generally stayed hidden when not working in case he was mistaken for an infant Troll.

‘So, what’s the problem, Pat?’ I asked.

‘Problem?’ came a voice behind us. ‘Problem? I expect no problems, only solutions!’

We turned to find the colonel, who, despite being retired, still wore a military uniform, with his chest an impressive array of brightly coloured ribbons, each representing a military campaign he had somehow missed owing to some unforeseen prior engagement.

‘Gadzooks!’ he said when he saw me. ‘A girlie. Bit young for this sort of work eh?’

I ignored his comment and stared at his florid features. He had a large moustache, and his eyes were wide and very blue. Oddly, they seemed to have no real life to them – looking into them was like staring at a creepily lifelike waxwork.

‘Mr Perkins and I are here to ensure the oak-moving goes as planned. It goes without saying that this is all within the price we quoted.’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘right. Do you take tea?’

I thanked him and said that we did, to which he replied that he was only asking me, and after persuading him that tea for all of us would get the job completed that much more quickly, he trotted off indoors.

‘So,’ I said, turning back to Patrick, ‘what’s the problem?’

Patrick beckoned me across to the colonel’s arboretum, a small spinney of trees surrounding a lake. He indicated two large circular holes in the ground fifty yards apart. One presumably from where the oak had been, and another where it was meant to end up.

‘Everything was going as planned,’ said Patrick, indicating the half-done job, ‘but just as I’d got the oak halfway from one place to the other, I had a surge and . . . well, can you see over there?’

He pointed to the far shore of the lake. Sitting on the lakeside was the oak tree, roots and all.

‘That’s about half a mile away,’ said Perkins.

‘I surged,’ said Patrick simply, ‘and then every time I tried to move the oak closer, the power just leapt and I dumped it even farther away.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘this is what we’ll do: Patrick, I want you to walk around the lake, lift the oak and bring it back. If you get another oversurge, I want Perkins to channel the excess into anything he wants. Questions?’

‘What should I channel the oversurge into?’

‘See how many fish you can lift out of the lake.’

Perkins looked at the lake, then at his fingers. Levitation was something he could do. There were no more questions and they began to walk off around the lake. I stood and watched them for a moment, then heard a noise on the wind. Something odd and familiar that I couldn’t quite place. I walked across the lawn and towards a rusty battle tank that the colonel had transformed into a tasteless garden feature by the addition of several pot plants and a Virginia creeper on the gun barrel.

‘Who’s there?’ I asked, and heard a rustling.

I pushed aside the azaleas and walked behind the armoured vehicle, where I found a pile of grass clippings and a compost heap. Nothing looked even remotely unusual, but as I was leaving I noticed that one of the tank’s heavy tracks had been chewed, and recently. I peered closer at the toothmarks on the torn section of track, then searched the soft earth near my feet. I soon found what I was looking for: several dullish metal ball bearings of varying size. I picked them up and moved farther into the scrubby woodland, but after searching for five minutes and finding nothing more, I returned to wait for Patrick and Perkins to bring the oak back, which they did without any problems at all. The oak fitted snugly in its new hole, and the earth was soon moved in.

‘Easy as winking,’ said Patrick, ‘without any surging at all. I guess you guys had a wasted journey.’

‘Never a waste, Patrick,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘Call us any time.’

‘Sorry for the delay,’ said the colonel as he returned with the tea things. ‘I made some scones. Good show with the oak. Have you time to move the silver birch twelve feet to its left?’

‘You’ll have to rebook, sir, we have quite a full—’

‘Where did you get those?’

The colonel was staring at the ball bearings I had found behind the tank. I knew what they were, but I hadn’t expected him to as well. They were cadmium-coated cupro-nickel spheres with a zinc core.

‘Quarkbeast droppings!’ exclaimed the colonel. ‘I’ve been after a Quark for years. I must fetch my dart gun.’

And he was off, running surprisingly fast for a seventy-year-old.

‘A Quarkbeast?’ said Perkins. ‘The same one that was nibbling the plinth outside the Towers?’

I shrugged and told him I had no idea, then suggested they return to Kazam and lend their minds to the depetrification of Lady Mawgon.

‘Where’s the odd-looking fella and the young one with the sticky-out ears?’ asked the colonel when he had returned with his gun.

‘The next job,’ I replied, but the colonel wasn’t listening. With his hunting instincts all a-quiver, he had already reached the tank, examined the gnaw marks, and loaded the weapon with two large tranquilliser darts.

‘Tipped with carbide steel,’ explained the colonel, ‘to penetrate their hide.’

‘While I applaud your efforts to not kill it,’ I said, ‘might I ask what you are thinking of doing with an unconscious Quarkbeast?’

‘Do you know how much people will pay to hunt for Quarks?’ he said with a grin. ‘The King’s deer park over at Moccas would be an admirable base from which to run hunting trips.’

‘They’ll be hard to catch,’ I said.

‘I’m counting on it.’ The colonel grinned. ‘I might get ten or more hunts out of it before the blighter is finally bagged. Now listen, girlie,’ he continued, ‘I need to know all about Quarkbeasts. What they like, what they dislike. Best way to sneak up on one, favourite colour, that kind of stuff.’

‘Why don’t you speak to Once Magnificent Boo?’ I replied. ‘She runs a Quarkbeast rescue centre in the west of town.’

‘I tried, but Miss Smith is somewhat . . . angry,’ admitted the colonel. ‘I thought I might get more sense out of you. And don’t pretend you know nothing about them. Your affection for the little beasts is well documented. There’s a bronze statue outside Zambini Towers, for goodness’ sake, raised by you and your wizardy chums.’

I could have told him many things. About how they like to chew on scrap metal and aren’t particularly fussy – except about lead, which gets stuck between their teeth, and cobalt, which gives them the runs. I could have told him how they change colour when they get emotional, or how they need linseed oil to keep their scales shiny, or how they like a walk twice daily. I might have told him that they were loyal, rarely ate cats and, despite appearances, were warm and faithful companions that it would be an honour to walk alongside. I could have said all that, but I didn’t. I said this:

‘They can chew their way through a double-decker bus lengthwise in under eight seconds, and know when they are being tracked. If threatened, they will launch a pre-emptive attack with a degree of savagery that would make a Berserker faint. You don’t want to be hunting Quarkbeast, Colonel.’

‘Yes, yes, whatever you say. Now be quiet. I don’t want to lose it.’

And so saying, he began to track the Quarkbeast, and I with him. If there was a chance to put him off his aim or alert the beast, I would take it. The tracking was quite easy, as beasts can rarely pass any metal without a quick bite to see whether it would make a good snack or not. In this manner we passed a sheet of nibbled corrugated iron, a bitten wire fence and an abandoned car with the chrome licked off the bumpers. The colonel dropped to one knee and peered around carefully.

‘Reminds me of the time I was hunting Frazzle in East Anglia,’ he whispered. ‘Vicious blighters. Tracked a male for almost nine hours, you know.’

‘Impressive,’ I said sarcastically, ‘given the Frazzle’s agility, great speed and ability to outwit predators.’

He looked up at me and narrowed his eyes.

‘Do you mock me, girlie?’

I certainly did. A Frazzle is a cross between an armadillo and an elephant seal. Hugely ungainly, and well armoured. If he’d been tracking it for nine hours, he must have done it riding a tricycle.

‘What’s that noise?’ said the colonel, looking up.

‘I didn’t hear anything.’

Actually, I did. I leaned across and peered in the open window of the abandoned car and found the intelligent mauve eyes of a Quarkbeast staring back at me. The leathery scales that covered its back were partially raised in defence, and acidic drops of saliva hissed where they splashed upon the corroded metal. I placed my finger to my lips and it wagged its tail twice to say that it understood. This was bad news as Quarkbeasts have weighted tails, and it thumped against the old car like a drum.

In an instant the colonel had spotted the Quarkbeast and raised the gun to his shoulder. He didn’t get to fire. Instead, there was a bright flash of green and a deep whoompa noise – and in an instant, myself and the colonel were rolling end over end in the long grass.

I sat up and looked around. The Quarkbeast had vanished, but that wasn’t all that had changed. The remains of the abandoned car – every last mangled part of it – were now perfectly transformed into caramelised sugar, and the grass within the immediate vicinity was bright blue. I looked at the colonel, who now had his string vest and boxer shorts on the outside of his uniform. I was grateful that this had not happened to me, but noted that I had not been totally spared: my clothes were now on back to front, which is uncomfortable and disconcerting all at once.

‘What was that?’ asked the colonel, who seemed unconcerned that I now knew he had pictures of dancing hippos on his underwear.

‘I have no idea at all,’ I told him as I picked myself up. ‘Nope, none. None at all. Nothing whatever. Zip.’

‘Hmm,’ said the colonel, ‘think the Quarkbeast has gone?’

‘Long gone.’

I walked with him back to the house and borrowed the downstairs loo to put my clothes back on the right way – and was mildly perturbed to find that my clothes had been untouched and I had been turned back to front. I was now right handed and the small mole on my left cheek was now on my right. I’d have to ask Moobin if there might be any long-term health issues.

I drove back to Zambini Towers deep in thought, mostly about the Quarkbeast. I had lied when I told the colonel I didn’t know what we’d just witnessed. The beast had escaped in a short burst of wizidrical energy that had caused randomised passive spelling, hence the caramelised steel, clothing manipulation and my mirroring. Quite why it might suddenly do this I had no idea.

Quarkbeasts were weird, but up until then I had no idea how weird.