Thursday, February the 23rd, 2006
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Our serial story The Immense Duckpond Pamphlet hurtles ever more thrillingly towards its conclusion
There were twenty-six ponds in the grounds of the House, of varying sizes. Sixteen of them were ponds, and ten were duckponds. One of the duckponds was immense, it had claims to be a lake, there was so much water in it.
Moop trudged around this immense duckpond, her gaze fixed on the mud through which she trod. An hour earlier, she had stolen Blodgett's windcheater while his back was turned. It was far too big for her—it was far too big for Blodgett—and the hood hid her head completely. She was plunged in reverie. Every now and then, she stopped trudging and picked up a pebble to hurl into the immense duckpond, disturbing the eerily calm surface of the water. She wondered if the frenzied creature Unstrebnodtalb would arrest Trellis.
As she began her fifteenth circuit of the duckpond, the water was disturbed by something larger than her pebbles. With a chthonic churning and squelching, something hideous and scarcely describable rose to the surface. It was finned and scaled, but moved with robotic precision. It appeared to have a teeming mass of eyes, thousands of jellied globules quivering on their stalks. It made no noise. At the sight of it, nearby ducks suffered heart-attacks and perished.
Moop had more presence of mind than a duck. Unleashing a large net, she threw it over the hell-spawned aquatic beast-thing, then stunned it with a dart from her blowpipe. Binding it firmly with a length of stolen rope she found curled in a pocket of Blodgett's windcheater, she began to drag the nightmare-being back to the Leaking Building. It might possibly prove useful in her anti-potato research, she reflected.
She had gone barely ten paces when the duckpond-monster unaccountably slipped its bonds and whacked her on the skull with one of its mighty flippers, knocking her unconscious.