eel man

It was the Company Secretary, the man who had helped the Manager and who had grabbed Hogarth. He looked extremely angry and he was shouting.

‘Excuse me, I think you may be talking to the wrong people –’

Lucy stopped, and Primula turned towards the new voice. As she did so, her eyes widened. The man’s eyes had widened too. In fact, they had become perfectly round. As they watched, his face went dark and his mouth, opening and closing, became enormous. Then he fell to the ground at Primula’s feet. Everybody stepped back as he writhed there, on the concrete, like a gigantic eel. At the same time, everybody saw him slither out through his collar. He actually had become a giant eel! His trousers and jacket lay flat and crumpled. A six-foot-long eel, as thick as a man’s neck, lay squirming, knotting and unknotting, flailing its head this way and that, snapping its jaws which were the size of an Alsatian dog’s – and truly were very like an Alsatian dog’s.

Right there, in front of their eyes, the Company Secretary had become a giant eel.

Primula let out a tiny choking cry and collapsed. Her cameraman could not believe his luck. His camera zoomed in on her carefully painted face, with its bluish eyelids closed as if asleep, her hair spread out on the rough old concrete. From there it panned to the gnashing, glaring face of the great eel, only a yard from her. The newsmen’s cameras blazed. One of the journalists held a microphone close to the pointed snout.

‘Can you tell us what it feels like –’ he began, in that half-shouting, jerky voice used by interviewers, ‘– aaaaaaaaagh!’ The eel had clamped its jaws over both the microphone and his hand. He tore his bleeding hand free and staggered backwards. Others pulled Primula to her feet and she began to stare around woozily.

Now the eel, as if it knew exactly what it was doing, writhed on to the grass and away like a snake towards the river. Its tail flipped in the air as it went in.

The whole thing had taken barely a minute. All the journalists began to jabber at each other. Primula had suddenly recovered and was yelling at her cameraman: ‘Did you get any footage?’

- The Iron Woman, Chapter 5