he was right. What I was to do, he said, was to promise to send him every three months two thousand words of any old thing that came into my head. It had to be new, and by me, and not a copy of anything else I’d done, and I was to deliver it to him at the Town Hall. I said, but suppose I couldn’t even do that? And Mountjoy laughed and said here was the clever bit. I was to imagine he had the ability to stop the Council from supplying me with water and gas and light and to order them not to empty my dustbins and so on. He said if I made myself scared enough of that, I’d have no difficulty in writing his two thousand words. And he was right. I’m still grateful to Mountjoy. I went home and did him the first two thousand words, and as soon as I had, I began to write books again like a demon. I wrote Prying Manticora that same month. And the first draft of Stark in—”
“But wait a minute,” Catriona said, frowning. “If you’ve been sending Mountjoy stuff for thirteen years, and he’s been passing it on to this Archer, then Archer must have masses of it by now. What does he do with it?”
“Do you think Archer publishes it?” Howard asked. “He could be making a lot of money out of you.”
His father shook his head, rather uncomfortably. “He couldn’t, Howard. I always write really idiotic things that nobody would want to publish. Most of them aren’t even finished. You can’t get much into four pages. I’ll tell you – last year I sent Mountjoy a solemn discussion about what to do if rabbits suddenly started eating meat. This time it was about old ladies rioting in Corn Street.”
“What do you do about that?” Awful asked, bringing Quentin a slopping mug of weak grey tea.
“Dodge their handbags,” said Quentin. “Thanks.”
“No, stupid, I mean the rabbits,” said Awful.
“Set them catching mice, of course,” said Quentin. “No, Howard, I’d have noticed if anyone printed any of those things. I assure you, nobody ever has.”
“And is this the first time Mountjoy didn’t get the words?” Howard asked.
Quentin shook his head again. “It’s the first time they’ve gone astray, but there have been several times when I didn’t get around to doing them. Mountjoy never minds – except there was that one time…” Quentin stared at his tea, looking puzzled. “It was just after Awful was born,” he said. “You must remember, Catriona. She kept us awake every night for a month, and I was too busy trying to catch up on sleep to write anything. And quite suddenly, everything in the house was cut off. We’d no light and no heat, no electricity, no water, and the car wouldn’t go either—”
“Yes, I do remember,” said Catriona. “Howard screaming as well as Awful, because he was cold, and all the washing. Didn’t they say it was some sort of freak? I remember we kept having people to mend things and they said there was nothing wrong. What happened?”
“I went round to see Mountjoy,” said Quentin. “It was superstition really. And I remember he looked rather taken aback and muttered something about his superior’s not being as patient as he was. Then he laughed and told me to write the words and probably everything would come right. So I did. And all the power came back on while I was doing them. I really can’t explain that.”
He raised the tea to his mouth at last. Awful watched expectantly. “But I really can’t explain Archer’s Goon eith—” He took the mug away from his mouth again, with a sigh. “Don’t tell me, Awful. I forgot to say don’t put salt in it. What have you done to this mug?”
Quentin held the mug up to the light. There seemed to be big wobbly shapes carved into both sides of it.
“The Goon did that,” said Awful. “With his knife and there’s no salt in it, only sugar. He threw the knife at me, but it stayed in his hand.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Awful,” said Catriona. Very sane and severe, she took the mug and looked at it and felt the dents with her finger. “This can’t have been done with a knife. These marks are glazed over. It must have come like that from the shop.”
“The Goon did do it,” said Howard. “I saw him, too.”
Quentin took the mug back and held it up to the light again. “Then perhaps he tried to carve G for Goon,” he suggested jokingly. “It’s either a V or a Y on the other side. Do you think it’s A for Archer upside down?”
Howard knew from this that his father was not going to treat the matter of the Goon seriously. And he knew his mother was not either when she laughed and said, “Well, Quentin, make sure you do Mountjoy’s words in future. We don’t want Archer sending any more Goons round.”
In a way, it was a weight off Howard’s mind. The Goon had scared him. But if neither of his parents was worried, then that made it all right. He went upstairs to his room and sat comfortably among his posters of astronauts and aeroplanes, designing another spaceship until it was bedtime, and tried not to think of the Goon. But his mind would keep straying to all those words his father kept sending to Archer. What could Archer possibly do with them? Why did he want them badly enough to send the Goon for them?
During the night the set of drums the Goon had carried into the hall started to boom softly. Most of the family would not have noticed had not Catriona been so sensitive to noise. She woke everyone up three times, getting up and going downstairs to slacken them. She thought they must be vibrating to the traffic outside. But they continued to give out a gentle humming throb.
Catriona got up again and padded them with handkerchiefs. She got up again and filled them with socks. Finally, she woke everyone up for a fifth time by going and hurling all the spare blankets over them, with a mighty BOOM. Even then, she claimed, she could still hear them throbbing.
“Your mother spent the whole night listening to her own ears,” Quentin said irritably, shuffling into the kitchen with his hair on end and his eyes half-shut. “Where are my emergency supplies of tea?”
“Your paunch is sticking out of your pyjamas,” Awful said. “The Goon did them.”
“It was that Goon that last touched them,” Fifi yawned.
“What have I done to deserve Awful?” Quentin demanded. “Fifi, forget the Goon and save my life by giving me some tea. Everyone forget the Goon.”
Howard willingly forgot the Goon. He went to school and spent the day happily designing spaceships. He forgot the Goon so completely that it was a real shock to him when he came out of school with his friends at the end of the afternoon and found the Goon towering like a lighthouse on the pavement outside. The Goon saw Howard. Recognition came over his little face in slow motion. He turned and came wading towards him above the crowd.
Howard went suddenly from being the one who stuck out above the crowd to feeling frail and weak and kneehigh. He looked around for help. But all his friends, finding themselves in the path of the Goon, had quickly thought of things they needed to do elsewhere. Somehow they were gone, leaving the Goon towering above Howard.
“Came back,” the Goon pointed out, grinning as he loomed.
“So you did,” said Howard. “I almost didn’t notice. What do you want now?”
“Those words,” the Goon said. “They’re no good.”
“What do you expect me to do about it?” said Howard.
“Your
