Colvenhoof: Satan's Shorts (Clovenhoof Anthology) Read online

  A border collie started to dig a hole in the lawn, spraying soil into the mix as he pedalled frantically.

  Detritus melted away as owners caught up with dogs and tried to drag them away from the giant cakey mess, but the dogs were lapping eagerly at chocolate, icing and cream. A spaniel rolled in the remains of a victoria sponge and then jumped up at all the running humans, thinking it was a huge game.

  The wasps had started to cluster around the area, and were soon homing in on human and canine targets who were liberally coated with tempting sugar.

  Howls went up from the victims of wasp stings, and the flailing, flapping mob of dog owners spilled out onto the lawn, dogs jumping up and knocking them over with excitement.

  Detritus sighed with pleasure at the sight before him. He reached for his bag and grabbed a handful of leaflets that he'd created. They were a modification of a standard leaflet from an ambulance-chasing solicitor. This new leaflet was aimed at a much more niche market.

  Been injured or humiliated at a Church Fete? it asked.

  It went on to explain that large amounts of compensation might be won from one of the richest organisations in Britain. He considered it a master stroke. No time to bask in glory yet, though, he had work to do. He dropped a leaflet into every handbag or pocket he could access. He made sure that he left a batch at every point that people might pass on their way out, assuming they weren't distracted by wasp stings or hyped up dogs snapping at their ankles.

  “Can I have the teddy now?”

  Detritus scowled when he saw that Annabel had reappeared.

  “Didn’t I already say no? Why would I have changed my mind?”

  “Because I saw you spoil the dog show,” she said, staring up at him, “and I’m going to tell my mommy.”

  “Tell your mommy if you like. I’m going now, my work here is done,” said Detritus, smugly.

  “Don’t you want to see how far down that dog can get?” asked Annabel.

  “What dog?”

  “That one there, that’s digging the hole. That’s the one that was going to win the dog show. I saw it in the rehearsal and it can do somersaults.”

  Detritus rolled his eyes but he moved forward, curious.

  “Look after the wheelbarrow and you can have the teddy,” he told Annabel.

  The collie was around five feet below the surface of the lawn and was still digging. A sizeable arc of soil surrounded the hole, and the remains of the crowd who hadn’t been stung by wasps or chased by cake-splattered dogs surrounded the hole at a safe distance to watch in curiosity. The church warden, a tall, skinny man wearing a t-shirt emblazoned “Cowboy of Faith” made a couple of moves to catch the dog, but its superior agility made him stumble into the hole instead.

  Detritus pushed forward through the crowd, keen to enjoy the moment.

  “Are you all right, Peter?” called a woman nearby, peering anxiously into the hole.

  Peter pushed himself up onto his elbows and nodded.

  “I’m fine. We need to control these dogs, I’d better call the dog warden.”

  It seemed to Detritus that the collie turned to Peter and gave him a look. It took his sleeve between its teeth and tugged him towards the centre of the hole.

  “Oh! Oh! It’s attacking me! Someone help – wait, what’s this?” Peter crawled to the deepest part of the hole and scraped soil away from something solid. The collie stood back and watched as Peter moved more soil with his hands. After a few minutes, someone handed him a spade and he exposed a flat surface the size of a lap tray. Half an hour later, he hauled a wooden chest out of the hole onto the grass.

  “I think I need an expert to open this, it might be an antique,” said Peter, grasping the handle on the front of the ancient chest to drag it forward. There was a collective groan of disappointment from the crowd at this anti-climax.

  Detritus turned away, but then he whirled back as Peter yelled out in pain. The handle had pulled clean off the chest, which had fallen onto his foot and collapsed.

  The unmistakeable gleam of gold made the crowd gasp. Dozens of coins, and some ornate candlesticks tumbled across the grass.

  Detritus shook his head in disbelief. He glanced across at the collie, who was looking directly at him, tongue lolling out in what looked like laughter.

  He stomped back to get his wheelbarrow full of booty, but it wasn’t there. He saw Annabel surrounded by children who were squealing with excitement as they pulled the giant soft toys out and made off with them, smiling and laughing.

  It was all too much. Detritus had to get out of there. A pleasing calamity had been completely ruined with optimism, smiles and laughter.

  A week later, Detritus was toasting bread on his pitchfork and reading the local paper. He growled with impotent rage when he found the write-up of the church fete.

  Church’s future secured by discovery of ancient treasure.

  Parishioners at St Oswalds church could not believe their luck when they unearthed a priceless hoard of gold at their summer fete.

  One of many fundraising activities organised by the cash-strapped parish in an effort to repair the roof, the fete took an unusual turn when several dogs started to behave in a rather eccentric manner. A border collie single-pawdedly dug up nearly a quarter of a ton of soil in exactly the right spot to reveal the hidden treasure.

  Thought to have been hidden in an effort to protect the church’s riches from the agents of Henry VIII the gold has remained hidden since the sixteenth century. The collie, who has been hailed a “hero” and a “miracle” by locals has vanished. Parishioners have offered a reward to the owner, but so far nobody has come forward.

  In the final twist of the day, a mysterious benefactor who enjoyed a winning streak on the fete’s tombola stalls made sure that all of the children in attendance left with smiles on their faces as he gave out the toys and gifts that he had won and then disappeared as mysteriously as the dog.

  Clovenhoof and the Spiders

  Nerys came downstairs to find Clovenhoof breaking down a large cardboard box by the front door of the flats.

  “I always wonder what you’re up to when I see you get parcels in the mail,” she said. “Hopefully it’s just an inflatable woman, and not something that will explode or set fire to the house.”

  “Actually,” said Clovenhoof, standing up, “I am undertaking an entirely selfless exercise. This little project of mine is to help Ben. Furthermore, it was based on your idea.”

  “Well, how nice,” said Nerys. “So what exactly are you doing?”

  Clovenhoof beamed.

  “Do you remember the other night when we were in the pub?”

  “We’re in the pub every night.”

  “The night Ben hurt his elbow.”

  Ben had seemed to be in genuine pain. Gasping as he struggled to lift his pint of cider.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Nerys had asked.

  “Tennis elbow,” he winced.

  “I knew a man who had golf balls,” said Clovenhoof, sipping his Lambrini.

  “You don’t play tennis,” said Nerys.

  “Some of those books in my shop are quite heavy, I’ll have you know.” Ben gave a sudden shriek, leapt up onto his seat and pointed. “What was that?”

  Clovenhoof and Nerys swiveled their heads to peer at the corner of the pub.

  Clovenhoof walked over and picked up a spider, which raced across his hands.

  “Kill it!” squealed Ben.

  Clovenhoof rolled his eyes and walked to the door, where he shook it outside.

  “You’re not really that scared of such a small thing are you?” Nerys asked.

  Ben took a hearty swig of his drink and then whimpered at his tennis elbow.

  “Always have been,” he said. “Too many legs. Way they move. Urgh.”

  “I was reading a magazine article about people who’ve been cured of their phobias,” said Nerys. “They sent someone on a “tarantula experience”, and he realised there was nothing to be scared
of.”

  Ben gave her a withering look.

  “That sounds like torture.”

  “It’s quite clever,” said Clovenhoof. “I like it.”

  He had long ago ceased to be amazed by the fact that any Hellish torture his demons could devise had already been devised, tried and improved by human beings. Guantanamo Bay, I’m a Celebrity, Weight Watchers…

  “It’s stupid,” said Ben. “I bet that was in America or Essex or somewhere. Luckily nobody round here is about to try anything so ridiculous.”

  At the flats, Nerys dropped her keys and her face drained of blood as she stared at the empty box in Clovenhoof’s hands.

  “You haven’t?” she whispered.

  Clovenhoof nodded, with a wide grin.

  “I have just set up the ultimate tarantula experience for Ben. Did you know that anyone can buy tarantulas? They’re pretty cheap as well. I got twenty.”

  “So, you-” she stopped and put a hand to her head. “So, you got twenty tarantulas. Yes. Of course you did. What exactly did you do with the twenty tarantulas?”

  “I’ve put them in Ben’s flat. They’re all over the place. By the time he’s spent an evening there, he’ll be completely used to them.”

  “And you thought that would be a good idea?”

  “It’s brilliant! It was your idea, anyway.”

  “Jeremy, I think they do it a little differently. It’s always got to be a choice for the person. They must choose to handle the tarantula.”

  “Nah. That’d take too long. My way will be quicker. And more fun.”

  “You’re such an idiot!” yelled Nerys. “It won’t work at all. He’ll see the first one and probably drop dead from the shock. We need to go and get them. Now.”

  Clovenhoof met Nerys outside Ben’s flat thirty minutes later.

  “Interesting outfit,” Clovenhoof remarked.

  “Yes, well. I may not be as scared as Ben, but there’s no way a tarantula will be running up my trouser leg.”

  “No, not with parcel tape wrapped round your ankles.”

  “Or going down my neck.”

  “No, I can see that. I’m curious, why have you even got a veil? If I knew you were hoarding bridal wear I’d have kept you those little horseshoes from when I did tap dancing classes.”

  “It’s not a real veil,” said Nerys. “It’s for keeping flies off food. It will do for this though.”

  “Weapons too, I see.”

  “Well a dustbuster seems like the humane way to capture a tarantula if you don’t want to touch it.”

  “And the lump hammer?”

  “Backup.”

  They let themselves in using the emergency key.

  “Where do we look?” whispered Nerys.

  “I looked this up,” said Clovenhoof. “They like to find somewhere warm and hidden. I’ll check his box of dirty mags, you look in the airing cupboard.”

  Nerys made her way towards the bathroom, swiping the dustbuster protectively in front of her when she heard a key in the lock.

  “Oh no,” she breathed.

  Ben entered the flat and looked from Clovenhoof to Nerys and back.

  “What on earth are you doing?” he asked.

  “It was an emergency,” said Clovenhoof. “Nerys thought she heard a noise.”

  Ben’s eyes narrowed.

  “So she dressed up like a zombie bride beekeeper and broke in to investigate?”

  “Bees! Yes!” yelled Nerys. “I thought I heard masonry bees. They can cause devastation if they get into your walls.”

  “Oh. Right. Well I’ve come home to have a lie-down because I’m not feeling too well. You can do battle with phantom bees if you want, but keep it down, I’m going to bed as soon as I’ve had something to eat.”

  “You getting something from the fridge?” asked Clovenhoof.

  “Yeah, I’ve got a pork pie,” said Ben. “You’re not having any.”

  Nerys gave urgent questioning signals to Clovenhoof with her eyebrows.

  He responded with some less subtle signals indicating that he’d put a tarantula inside the fridge.

  Nerys was tempted to air some age-old signals to show exactly what she thought of this, but turned back to the immediate problem that Ben was pulling open the door of the fridge.

  “No!” she shouted.

  “What?”

  “Feed a cold, starve a fever,” she said. Everyone knows that. Looks like you’ve got a fever to me.”

  “What? I’ve got tennis elbow. I can eat what I like.”

  “You might have some bad pork pie. Imagine how much worse it would be to have tennis elbow with food poisoning!”

  “It’s fresh, I bought it yesterday. I don’t know why you think I’m such a slob that I can’t keep a fridge of decent food. Look! It’s all fine.”

  Ben stood aside with a flourish to show her the inside.

  Nerys saw a spider the size of her hand rearing up from the butter dish, exposing its fangs. She leaped forward and slammed the door.

  “Chicken soup is better,” she said. “Why don’t I make some while you take a nice bath?”

  She ushered a confused Ben to the bathroom, giving Clovenhoof a sharp kick as she passed him.

  “I’ll run the bath while Jeremy gets you a towel. From the airing cupboard.”

  “Will you two go away if I have a bath and eat some soup?” Ben asked.

  “Yes,” Nerys said.

  Ben laid himself back in the bath and thought that maybe this bizarre hijacking might work out all right. It was certainly relaxing to bathe his sore arm in warm water. He draped a flannel over his eyes and dazily listened to the voices coming through the thin wall.

  “I’m going to look it up on the internet,” said Nerys.

  “You need patience,” said Clovenhoof.

  “Patience? We only found one of them so far. Yes, put that one in the jar. There must be some other place that we haven’t thought of yet.”

  “Don’t panic. As long as we find them before Ben then it’ll be fine.”

  Ben grunted to himself. Why did they need to find masonry bees before he did? It’s not like he had spiders in the walls. He shuddered involuntarily, blindly reached for the bath scrunchie with one hand, the fat bar of soap with the other and started to lather up.

  “Here’s a discussion thread,” Nerys was saying. “It seems as though we’re not the first people to lose them in the house. We might be the first to mislay twenty though.”

  “Dark, humid places are favourites,” said Clovenhoof.

  “Oh here’s someone saying ‘try this.’”

  “Try leaving a dish of water out. Sooner or later it will get thirsty and you can lure it out.”

  “Maybe they’ve gone off in search of drink already.”

  “Somewhere, wet, dark and humid.”

  There was a moment’s silence and then Nerys and Clovenhoof cried out at once. There was a bang and crash as the bathroom door was forced in.

  Ben leapt to his feet, the flannel falling from his eyes as he covered his naked manly bits with the foamy scrunchie.

  “What the buggering hell do y-“

  He froze.

  For a mere fraction of a second he wondered if he had bought a new floral patterned shower curtain without realizing. And then he saw that those eighteen shapes were not flowers but hairy long-leggedy things.

  He took a deep breath, readying to scream, but then a little corner of his brain did a recount. Eighteen shapes. They had lost twenty, they said. They had put one in a jar. And there was his blue scrunchie hanging on the cold water tap, dry and untouched.

  Ben looked down at the soapy hairy thing he had pressed against his groin. A soap bubble burst on one its eight eyes. The tarantula wriggled angrily.

  And then the screaming began in earnest.

  A Cat In Hell’s Chance

  Rutspud scampered over the hot rocks to catch up with Slugwrench.

  “What is it?” he asked for the third time.
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br />   “Can’t tell you,” said Slugwrench, his punctured lung wheezing and spitting like an asthmatic bagpipe. “Must show you. It’s over here.”

  If friends were permitted in that place, Slugwrench would have been one of Rutspud’s best friend. As it was, Slugwrench was his favourite enemy, his least hated rival. Sure, Slugwrench was a bit too career focussed, too keen to climb that greasy pole (the one with venomous lobsters and angry dentists at the bottom) but he had a pleasant streak of individuality and, besides, Rutspud couldn’t help but respect a fellow who wore his major organs on the outside of his skin with such panache.

  Rutspud followed him around a lake of lava and through a copse of razor-sharp stalagmites.

  “I don’t usually come out this way,” he said.

  “Have they still got you working with the fornicators?” said Slugwrench.

  Rutspud gave a bitter laugh.

  “There’s so many of them, we’ve had to subdivide them. I work with the ‘but I was drunk, I didn’t mean it’ lot. It’s tough work but some of the stories you hear… This is new.”

  He stopped at the edge of a chasm and looked down into the gloom.

  “The Pit of Pride and Vanity,” said Slugwrench, apparently glad for the opportunity to stop briefly. His little heart, perched on top of his shoulder, was pulsating like a disco-dancing tumour. “It’s always been there.”

  “I know that,” said Rutspud. “I remember them, crawling around naked on all fours, trying to catch a glimpse of themselves in the jagged shards of mirror. Bloody hilarious. Literally. No, I meant these,” he said and pointed at the cameras positioned around the walls.

  “Oh, they are new,” said Slugwrench. “It’s the newer residents. Very sad cases. We’re thinking of renaming it the Reality Television Pit. Listen. You can hear them.”

  Rutspud strained his huge ears.

  A string of reedy voices could just be heard far below in the murk.

  “I really think I’ve got what it takes to make it to the next level…”