By Prudence Weatherpenny (Professor)

Although it was my housemate Miss White’s turn to attempt the laundry (“attack” might be more appropriate given the state of some of her garments, but that is a matter for some other time), I found myself joining in the most recent hunting of stray socks and stockings.

The regular discovery of seemingly-expired examples of these pieces is often distressing enough (I have covered this in a Treatise elsewhere, although I have my doubts that the Hopeless Philosophical Society here on the Island will ever publish it, narrow-minded and jealous little bigots that they are) but imagine my surprise – nay, almost horror! – when, on
lifting yet another raggedly woolly former-footwear from its place of expiration behind the chest-of-drawers, I was just in time to spot something slither away from the Scene of the Crime.

It did not take much pursuing: the house that Miss White and I currently share might be rickety, battered, tumbledown and slowly filling with mould – in other words a perfectly acceptable dwelling by Hopeless standards – but the wainscoting is solid and the skirting-boards sound. We do not even suffer from mice in the usual way of things beyond the
scullery (as far as I am aware they have not yet evolved sufficiently to contemplate tool usage), so I was confident of their being no escape for this… whatever it was. And so it proved!

The timely, inspired and spontaneous re-employment of the Chamber Pot as a temporary prison was a master-stroke, if I say so myself; what matter a little extra cleaning afterwards? Is that not what we engage an Orphan for?

Whatever this thing was, it was lively! It slithered and clattered and thrashed around within the porcelain as, with a heavy book across the top, I carried it downstairs into the scullery – where, not only is the light better but it is where my Research Implements are kept, such as
they are on this Island (any implication that they also form part of the Kitchen Paraphenalia is firmly and resolutely refuted, I might add). With a notebook to hand, and Miss White to take those notes and assist as I might direct, we lifted the book from the pot and peered inside.

It was immediately obvious that whatever we had caught was at least a part of the solution to the most common cause of death found among our socks and similar, for in the short journey down the ramshackle stairs, it had either coughed up – or otherwise ejected from itself – some unmistakable strands of wool and silk. Aha! – so socks can – sometimes at least – fall prey to this… well, what was it, precisely? It did not exhibit the body-segments one might expect from a worm, or at least those in the outside world, but nor did it have the scales of a regular serpent. It was clearly quite at home in air rather than water, but I was minded most strongly of the Lamprey, especially when the creature reared up unexpectedly as Miss White’s rather frayed jacket-cuff strayed over the pot in her reaching for yet another biscuit (we are going to have to either stop buying those quite so often, or discover a seamstress to let out some of her dresses). As it did so, this diminutive little worm-creature
revealed the most enormous mouth, a mouth lined with ferocious, if minuscule, teeth!

From a body no broader than a knitting-needle but almost as long as a middle-finger, came a gape fully as round as my palm, and those teeth were sharp – as Miss White discovered to her chagrin. The wound is still not fully healed even now, though it does not appear to affect her
ability to pull biscuits from the jar.

Mindful of the usual pattern of Island Life, particularly when things are released into the wild, I am at something of a loss as to what to do with the creature. I have discovered no others, and the rate of death among our stockings appears to have lessened, which can only be a good thing given the scarcity of such items on the island generally. I have no wish to set it loose in the landscape as it clearly represents a serious danger to one and all; I think on balance I might keep it somehow, against the chance of slight or insult from one or other of my fellow-dwellers on this little island in the mist. Perhaps that information might even be
sufficient to “persuade” the Philosophical Society of the good sense in overcoming their ages-old and completely nonsensical prejudices and actually publishing some of my findings at last!

(Actual author, Roz White, image by Nimue)