age 18 transform

Was that the end of it? It was not. Not by a long way.

Not just all over the town, but all over the country men had turned into giant fish, giant newts, giant insect larvae, giant water creatures of some kind. Every man over eighteen years old was in water. And if their eighteenth birthday came on that day, down they flopped with the cake in their mouths.

Wherever the women could not get their husbands into the rivers or reservoirs or ponds, they got them into baths and swimming pools. Nearly every bath in the land had a record-sized barbel, or pike, or some other man-sized fish in it. Or a huge water flea. Here and there it was a monster leech. Mr Wells the giant catfish was now in the swimming pool at his large new home. His two little sons spent their time digging worms and dropping them in, to see him sucking them up off the blue tiles with his great blunt mouth.

The Prime Minister himself was a six-foot-long dragonfly larva, in the bath at Number Ten. His secretary came in every hour to tell him about the latest phone calls, but all he did was wave his feelers at her and push his strange mechanical jaws in and out. Lucy’s father was a giant newt. Her mother had collected him from the river in the car, and now he was in the bath. He had to curve his jagged, high-crested tail slightly, to fit in. She was feeding him with cat food. That was a big problem, feeding these creatures, especially those still in the rivers.

- The Iron Woman, Chapter 5