The Beasts of Upton Puddle by Simon West-Bulford Page B

come.”
    â€œStranger than a giant red cat with wings and a spiked club for a tail?”
    The old woman smiled wistfully. “There are beasts in this world so bizarre and so fantastic they defy reason. Some are so terrifying they’d turn every hair on your head white if you just looked at them. Others are too beautiful to describe.
    â€œDid you know, for example, there are colonies ofcreatures alive today that hide themselves away in great underground caverns? Fearsome, black monsters that spit acid and can crush any intruder twenty times their own size with scissorlike mandibles.
    â€œAnd still other creatures with two sets of wings as delicate as paper-thin glass that communicate with each other by dancing. And when they aren’t doing that, they spend a great deal of their time producing a substance I find rather delicious on toast . . . I have a few jars at the back of this vault.”
    Joe’s jaw was dropping lower with each word Mrs. Merrynether spoke. “Will I ever get to see any of those?”
    â€œWhat? You’ve never set eyes on a common garden ant or a honey bee, lad?” She winked. “My point is that every creature is amazing. We’re just so familiar with them that eventually we forget to appreciate how magnificent they are.”
    Joe smiled and nodded. “I didn’t know bees talked to each other by dancing, though!”
    â€œThe wax is ready,” Heinrich called.
    â€œGood! Be careful, Heinrich. Cornelius is asleep, but he might not take kindly to a dose of hot wax.”
    The huge man stepped inside the enclosure, knelt beside the manticore’s tail, and with gentle precision, he grasped it just below the spikes. Glancing at the tail and the beast’s head, Heinrich poured the wax carefully over a portion of the quills.
    They all watched as the wax hardened.
    A few tense seconds passed before Heinrich started prying the wax free. There was a soft crackling noise as a cluster of quills popped out from the manticore’s tail. “It’s working, Ronnie. A lot of them are coming free.”
    â€œThat’s good news.”
    Still watching the sleeping animal, Heinrich stepped out of the enclosure, holding a formidable lump of thorny wax.
    Mrs. Merrynether sat in the chair and sighed as she looked mournfully at the sleeping beast. “All we can do now is wait. Hold on, Cornelius. Hold on.”

S IX
    Joe was distracted when he arrived home. Thoughts of the manticore and how it was suffering squeezed everything else out of his mind, and he traipsed from the porch and into the living room with a distant expression that caught not only his mum’s eye but his aunt’s too. His mum sat in one armchair talking on the phone, and his aunt sat in another clasping a copy of
Wrestling Today
in her chubby fingers.
    As Joe slumped loudly onto the sofa, the pages of his aunt’s magazine flicked up and launched crumbs into the air. Hardened cake debris pitter-pattered against the glossy paper.
    Joe smiled for an instant, mostly because of Aunt Rose’s look of surprise.
    She licked one of her thumbs and set to work jabbing at each morsel so she could have another taste. “Waste not, want not,” she said with a sunshine grintaking over her podgy face.
    Joe liked Aunt Rose. In truth, she wasn’t actually his aunt but such a close friend of the family that Joe’s mum had always called her that, and so had Joe. She was like a nightclub bouncer squashed into the body of a Victorian cook who had helped herself to a few too many currant buns over the years.
    For as long as he could remember, Aunt Rose had always been around, looking out for him. When he was five years old, Aunt Rose took him to Mr. Bacon’s petting farm every Thursday afternoon. Joe would drive his toy tractor about the grassy mounds, pretending to be a farmer rounding up livestock. But one particular Thursday, Mr. Bacon had hired a new farmhand—a man