On fleek

The house looked pleasant from the outside: there was a paved path across a neatly mown green lawn and the white picket fences were bolstered by medium-height green shrubs.  A couple of tall, leafy trees cast shade over the white patio furniture, but they were far enough away from the house that it was unlikely that their roots were doing terrible, invisible things to the plumbing.  The house itself was a piece of classic Americana: it was made primarily out of wood and about as resistant to storm damage as a cardboard box.  It sprawled: the main house had four wings coming off it in seemingly random directions, some of which had two, three or five stories, and others of which slummed it with only one.  The roof was shingled and cellar-doors hinted that the house had below-ground floors as well.  There was a veranda at the front, a porch down one side, a deck at the back and barbed wire on the fourth side, though that might have been an oversight.  A small name plaque just above the doorbell read "Dunnukin".
There were also nearly one hundred and eighty people camped outside, spread across the road and occupying the front gardens of the rest of the houses in the street.

"What, I say what, and I mean, what, in the name of all tarnation is going on here?" The tall, portly man in the military uniform sounded like Foghorn Leghorn.  He was smoking a cigar, which smelled like a damp bonfire in December, and he was staring at a young woman sat in a high-backed chair.  She had an iPad in her hands, and was tapping at the screen with a look of concentration on her face.
"Interviews," she said.
"I say what now?"
"Do you?"  She looked up, uncurious, and then went back to the screen.
"All of these people want interviewing?" Foghorn Leghorn gestured vaguely at the windows.
"No silly, those are the journalists.  They want to conduct interviews.  With the gentleman of the house, should he be at home."
"And if he be'ent?"
Now she looked up with interest.  She had a face like a porcelain doll: skin the colour of fresh milk, eyes a dazzling blue and lips reddened with just a caress of lipstick.
"Be'ent?  Not aint?"
"Aint if you like it, I say.  What now, though, what now and why do all these folks want an interview with a man who mightn't even be at home?"
"To find out if he is who he says he isn't?"
"What what?"
"To find out if he be who he says he be'ent? Is that clearer?"
"Young lady, you're not so young as you can't be bent over my knee and slippered!"
"You so much as lay a finger on me and I'll hashtag-meToo you all over my blog," she said, just a tinge of pink blushing her cheeks.  "You can go and pay for that kind of thing like any decent pervert."
"Lords of creation, you're a minx, madam, what!"

"Is this really fair?" asked Death.  He was sitting in a motorcycle side-car wearing a leather jacket he'd borrowed from James Dean.  Riding the actual motorcycle was War.
"They're everywhere," said War.  "It's not about fair anymore, it's about attrition.  And I know all about that.  That turned out to be me too, even though I thought it was Pestilence."
"Did you?"
"Turns out he does malnutrition instead," said War.  "Too many words these days, that's the problem."
"So you set Psychological Warfare on the journalists?  That still seems... unfair," said Death.  "Couldn't you just have asked one of the kids for help?"
"Pestilence is looking after Famine," said War.  He sighed.  "Famine's been overtaken by himself I think.  He's barely coherent these days, I met him at a state fair a few months back and couldn't understand a word he was saying.  If Pest can bring him back to himself, that would be good."
Death gazed off into the distance for a long moment, and War shivered.
"I wish you wouldn't do that," he said.  "It's not nice being reminded that you come for all of us."
"Famine's a long way from my reach," said Death thoughtfully.  "Though he's enriching my sphere of influence all the time."
"Keeping you busy?"
"Tasteless," said Death.
"You can talk.  You don't have journalists wanting to idolise you whenever you set foot outside of your house."
"Move house?"
War shrugged.  "And go where?  It's not like it's hard to find me.  Even here: I thought I could avoid conflict and three days after I moved in the Residents' Association had started a pitched battle with the Neighbourhood Watch.   It was like the Somme all over again.  Even down to the trenches."
"I like the trenches.  They add to the ambience I think."
"You just like skulking in the shadows."

Paucity

"QTNA, amirite, fam?"
"Fam," said Pestilence, his gaunt white face bright in the sodium streetlight as the car passed momentarily beneath it, "what the hell is QTNA?"
"Questions That Need Answering," said Famine.  He sounded happy but his face was drawn and his eyes suggested tears.  "All the ones on fleek, right, like, the ones that are sleek right, the ones that arise in the night, amirite?"
Pestilence turned the heater in the car on and shivered.  Technically he never felt the cold, but he had the sensation that this was one of those nights, the ones when the old gods woke up and took a turn around the property to see where things were being neglected.  Some sensitives described it as the feeling of a storm over the horizon but headed your way, others described it as a bone-chilling, bed-wetting terror that pressed down like a pillow over your face at midnight.
"What," he said slowly, precisely, "is wrong with you Fam?  You're practically incomprehensible these days."
"QTNA, amirite, fam?" said Famine miserably.  "Take a left here, bro."
On the left was a sheer drop, fifty metres down to a concrete carpark behind a big box retailer, but Pestilence flicked on the indicator and took the turn as smoothly as a racing driver.  The car behind him slowed at first, the driver unable to understand the indicator, then fishtailed as the driver stamped on his brakes and lost control watching the car in front of him drive off the road.  Red taillights disappeared downwards and the driver wrenched his door open and ran to the edge of the road, unwilling to believe that he'd just seen a suicide.
Below him were the floodlights illuminating the carpark, and a complete absence of wreckage.

Pestilence's car hummed softly as it drove through the air.  Around them the world had changed, becoming more shadowy and less substantial, and they might be driving on a cobweb bridge spun by the world's largest spider.
"Better than the horses," said Pestilence after a while.  "Don't get me wrong, I liked them, but they're harder to ride, and they get all temperamental and jittery when something big's happening.  None of that with these machines."
"Yeah," said Famine.  He drawled, sounding Texan.  Then he yawned.  "Jesus, bro, how long have we been away?"
An aurora rippled across the sky in front of them reflecting off the polished black bonnet of the car.  Pale greens and blues swapped large bands of themselves around like a rubik's cube preparing to be solved.
"Five years," said Pestilence.  "It didn't feel like it.  I couldn't have told you that back in the World.  I'd have thought it was only a few days."
"Too long," said Famine.  "Too much belief in us these days."
"Deeper than belief," said Pestilence.  "We're victims of our own success, you know?  People know deep down that we're real and that we walk amongst them.  They're proud of it, in some odd way.  You know they're worried that I'm going to win against their antibiotics?  I attended a conference on it.  Everyone knew I was real, everyone knew in their hearts that I was going to win, all they could do was hold me back for a few days.  I could have proclaimed myself King in that hall, and they'd have raised a temple to me."
"Same," said Famine.  "They all think they're pretty much one harvest away from being guests at my table.  It's like two thousand years ago again, only they're somehow starving because they're too afraid to eat."
"Why are you all incomprehensible though, Fam?"
"Hah."  Famine's laugh was practically a sneer.  "Paucity of vocabulary, mate.  There's a famine of language going on, and it's caught up with me.  Empty words, empty phrases, sounds parroted by the sublebrities of the day and mimicked across social media.  I can read all the dictionaries you want, I can sit and discourse for hours with the erudite and intellectual, but at the level of the lowest common denominator it's on fleek, amirite?  Fam?"
"You're a mystery to me, Fam fam," said Pestilence.  "Am I doing it right?"
"QTNA, mate," said Famine.  "What happened to the other two?"
"War's got groupies," said Pestilence.  "I think he's hiding from them.  And us, for that matter, I don't think he's handling the fame so well."
"And the big boy?"
Pestilence drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, watching the aurora dance for a few seconds.
"Last I heard," he said, with reluctance clearly audible, "he'd invented the Selfiecide."
Fam laughed, a hearty belly laugh that seemed wrong coming from someone thin enough to think emaciated was a compliment.  "You've got to hand it to him," he said. "He moves with the times."
"You'd think he'd be busy enough."  Pestilence sounded disapproving, his voice tight and prissy.
"He's only getting busier," said Famine.  "Like us all though, amirite?"
Pestilence looked over at Famine, wondering if there was irony there, and then peered through the windscreen.  "Ah," he said. "We're heading back in.  It was nice talking to you, Fam."
"I can still hear you, bro," said Famine quietly.  "It's just that it's a bit of an echo chamber at the moment.  You can still spill the serious tea with me, you know, bro?  I've got the screenshots."
Despite himself Pestilence giggled, and the car transitioned from the unreal back to the real, entered the World on a dusty, empty highway.  A little distance away the red light of a diner's neon sign flickered a welcome, and somewhere far away in a lost direction forces that might be gods paused to observe that there were Horsemen out there still, untouchable by any of them.

Fam

Moths were fluttering under a streetlight outside, dancing around to some music only they could hear.  Stood below them were two women on the wrong side of thirty wearing crop-tops and mini-skirts and made up to look like they were in their early twenties.  Their slouch suggested they didn't want to be there; the way they straightened up and posed whenever a car cruised too slowly past or a single man went by suggested they were on the clock.
Pestilence sighed and turned away from the window.  Across the diner table sat Famine, the laminated tri-fold menu held in pale, wasted hands.  "Emphysema," he said.
"Nice," said Famine.  "You don't get that a lot.  And you've avoided anything obvious, like a job-related illness.  Both of them?"
"Nah, I got the one on the left," said Pestilence.  "You can have the one on the right, bro."
"Cool, fam."  He waved to the waitress who wrinkled her nose and reluctantly hauled herself off a counter stool and lumbered over.  She was heavyset and her beige uniform had grease stains on the skirt  and down the left-hand side of her blouse.  She was wearing support stockings that might once have been white but were now a uniform grey and her name badge had been broken in half at some point.  All that was left was a red-bordered white plastic shard reading "AIL".
"A couple of hotdogs for the ladies outside, please," said Famine.  "With extra mustard.  It must be cold out there.  And I'll have the entire breakfast menu.  Twice."  He looked at Pestilence.  "Fam?"
"You're Fam, bro," said Pestilence.  "I'll have a banana split.  Extra whipped cream."
"What from the breakfast menu, son?" asked the waitress.  She shifted her weight from one thick leg to the other and farted.
"All of it," said Famine.  "Twice."
"There's seventeen items on there, hon.  Which of them do you want?"
"All seventeen.  Twice.  That's thirty-four items."
The waitress eyed him coldly while she counted up seventeen twice in her head and decided that the answer was in fact thirty four.  "Fine," she said.  Behind her a cockroach scuttled across the floor.  "Two breakfasts for kings, a banana split with extra whipped cream, and hotdogs for your girlfriends."  She turned away and waddled to the kitchen.  Half-way there she turned back.  "How do you like your eggs?"
"All the ways you do them," said Famine.  He smiled as nicely as he could, but his hollow cheeks and dark-ringed eyes still made it look like a skull grinning.  "You're fam too, fam," he said to Pestilence.
"Nah bro, I'm your bro.  You're fam."
"Not Fam, fam.  Fam."
"Fam?  Shut up."
"Bro, just hang, right?"
"Jesus, Famine, were you always like this?  What were you like when you were a kid?"
Famine stared at Pestilence, his eyes burning in his head like coals.  "The teachers called me trouble," he said.  "They blamed me for the other kids's problems.  Like when everybody's lunchbox turned out to be empty because all their mothers had forgotten to pack them lunch."
"That sounds like something you'd do," said Pestilence.
"Yeah, right, but I didn't know I was doing it back then," said Famine.  "My dad was still Famine back in those days.  When I was eight he got me into the family business, let me team up with Crop Failure and his gang.  I'd go out riding a Harley on the weekends and we'd tear up some cornfields or a potato crop.  Didn't know that the whole Famine thing was going to land on my shoulders.  Bro."
"A Harley?" Pestilence nodded his head slowly.  By the kitchen another three cockroaches had appeared and were creeping under the door.  "Rich fam, Fam?"
"Nah, but War's parents were sharing out the spoils.  They liked horses, so the cars and bikes and aeroplanes were being handed out like candy.  They were good times."
"My sixth grade class all came down with galloping pleurisy three days into the start of the school year," said Pestilence.  "I got exclusive tuition for the rest of the year, and the teachers all treated me like I was the only survivor of a car crash or something."
"I heard about that," said Famine.  Outside a young kid in chef's whites was delivering hotdogs to the women in the lamplight.  Everyone looked confused.  "Didn't the same thing happen the next year."
"Sort of," said Pestilence.  "Half of them got yellow fever and the other half got scarlet fever.  After that  there weren't any kids near my age to be in class with me.  What did you put in the hotdogs then, Fam?"
"Tapeworm," said Famine.  "Classical and classy, that's me.  How're the cockroaches going?"
"Hundred and fifty so far," said Pestilence.  "I don't think we're going to get served you know." Screams came from the kitchen.
"Should have ordered ahead," said Famine.  "You've think we'd remember by now."

A brewery of egg-shells

Grey Ellen stood in the corner of the Innishere public house.  Outside it was raining, a slow but solid curtain of water that fell down relentlessly from a sky the colour of polished lead and turned the hillside roads into ad hoc streams.  Birds huddled on branches under broad leaves, heads tucked under wings, and the smells of wet peat and dark loam rose up around them.  Inside, the fire in the long stone hearth crackled happily throwing out waves of heat into the main room and any rain finding its way down the tall chimney evaporated back up before it ever reached the flames.  Cooking smells -- browning pastry, popcorn and burning sugar swirled amongst the tables, and the drinkers held tall glasses of dark ales and golden lagers to their lips while they listened to their companions hold forth on myriad topics.
Mrs McAleethie came in, shaking her umbrella off so that rainwater glistened brightly in the air before spattering on the nearest tables.  She hung it on Grey Ellen's arm, and then draped her sou'wester over Ellen's head where it joined two others.
"I'm a glass of white, Seamus," she said to the barman, looking around the room.  "And I'm not a one to go calling out the Queen of the Fairies or nothing, but she's up and taken my wee bairn and left me with a thing that looks like a raven had sex with a stick and they got to arguing over who should be pregnant."
There was a moment of silence while the drinkers considered what that might look like, and then a gentle hubbub returned and Seamus poured a glass of white wine at the bar.  He picked a fruity Sancerre as it seemed like Mrs McAleethie was a mite upset.
There was a clatter as Grey Ellen dropped the umbrellas and shook the raincoats off of her head.  She kicked aside outdoor boots and trampled Wellingtons, and generally made a complete pig's ear of a mess in the corner.  Mrs McAleethie scampered to the bar to grab her glass of wine before Ellen might think to take it for herself.
"Sweet chaos, sister," said Ellen.  She was called Grey because the locals believed that she straddled, somehow, the world of men and the world of the fay, and naturally that meant she couldn't be trusted.  It was pure coincidence, so they said, that her hair had greyed before she reached the age of twenty-five, and that a chance encounter with leprosy had left her with skin that only a zombie could envy.  "When you make bold statements like that you risk drawing the gaze of Our Mother of Nails.  What on earth could bring you to think that she'd violate the treaties and truces that we have and swap out a bairn for a boggart?"
"Aside from the fact we seem to make a fresh treaty every three months, swearing that this time we believe they'll honour it?"  Seamus's words seemed almost incidental, but somehow no-one else had been speaking when he spoke.  The gentle hubbub rose around him again and he swabbed the bar with a stinking, grey cloth.
"The child is little more than a toast-rack with the head of a Barbie doll," said Mrs McAleethie. "And not a new one, neither, but one that your older sister tried to barbecue one summer to punish her for putting out for Ken too often.  Calling it a child is a mercy to it, so it is; if it had feathers we'd pity it and drown it in the Holy Water at the Kirk, but as it is the Father, Lord bless his inebriate soul, says that the thing is just afflicted with the ugly and should be loved despite it."
"But are you sure it's a changeling?" asked Grey Ellen, her eyes bright in her thin, undernourished face.
"That I'm not," said Mrs McAleethie in the tones of a woman who was sure she was right but was trying hard to appear humble.  "I guess it's possible that I've bore a child who looks so little like me or my husband that we've both been wondering if we were both cheated on."
"You must be sure," said Ellen.  She hugged herself. "Have you suckled the child?"
"Bejesus no!  I'd sooner let the dog!"
Heads turned.
"But I won't!"
Heads turned away again.
"Then do as I say," said Grey Ellen, deepening her voice and ducking her head.  "Set the child before the fire in a bassinet and set a pot of water onto the fire to heat.  When the water seethes and bubbles as though raging at the injustice that Our Mother of Nails has committed to you, you must crack a dozen eggs and discard the contents.  Place each shell in the liquid, and bring it back to the boil.  If the child be a changeling it will surely reveal itself, and then you must seize it and plunge it into the boiling water as well.  But watch carefully -- when it flees your child will be returned and you must pluck it from the water before the heat hits it."
"Boil the baby," said Mrs McAleethie with an unwholesome tone of pleasure in her voice.  "All you drinking here, you're witness to what she just said.  I'm off to boil the baby, as per her instructions."
"That's not quite what I said," said Ellen, but Mrs McAleethie was hauling on a sou'wester and unfurling an umbrella and heading out into the curtains of rain.

The fire was small, but still enough to heat the McAleethie kitchen, and the baby in the bassinet was set in front of it and sweating like it was the middle of summer.  As Mrs McAleethie cracked eggs and set the white and yolks aside, casting the shells into the pot, the baby sat up.
"Have you been talking to Grey Ellen?" said the baby in a deep, masculine voice that suggested a lifetime of rich foods and courtly dancing.
"What if I have?"
"Only she's the only witch I know who thinks boiling eggshells is a sovereign remedy," said the baby.  "A dozen, right?"
Mrs McAleethie stopped cracking and turned to the child.  "You're a changeling," she said. "Ellen said that this would force you to reveal yourself."
"You could have just asked," said the baby.  "I've been here eight months and you've not said one word to me.  If I was really your child I'd be struggling to acquire language right now.  My first words would likely be "I want a divorce.""
"And what are you doing here anyway?  Where's my wee bairn, Johnnie Sebastian?"
"Dead," said the baby.  "He had kidney failure at nine days.  The Queen didnae want to see you upset, so she provided you with a surrogate for a wee while."
"Dead!" Mrs McAleethie sat back. "So it is.  And how does having you here help?"
"With the grieving," said the baby.  "You've had much longer to come to terms with losing the child, you'll get over this better and you'll have other children.  What are you going to do with the eggshells you're brewing so, then?"
"Ellen said to boil the baby," said Mrs McAleethie absently.  "Sodom and Gomorrah child, now I've no child at all.  What am I to do then?"
"Get pregnant," said the baby. "Or adopt."
"That's like stealing, but it's legal, right?"
"Mostly," said the baby.  "Though I'd not tell them about Grey Ellen and you taking her advice to boil babbies if I were you."
"Gomorrah," said Mrs McAleethie.  "I always thought I'd get the true child back after all this."
"He's a bit decomposed," said the baby.  "Quite runny in a lot of places too.  I... wouldn't."
"I can understand that," said Mrs McAleethie. "Of course, it seems a bit unkind to leave him with your Queen in that state too, ye ken?  I'm thinking maybe you could deliver him to Grey Ellen?  By way of thanks for all her advice?"
She and the baby shared a smile.

Chippo

Crumbling, yellowed brickwork rose over an accidental courtyard.  The southernmost wall was better maintained than all the rest and was the outside wall of a slaughterhouse; the rest were owned by buildings erected only forty years earlier and derelicted within fifteen years.  Grass grew weakly through the gaps between paving stones, and two concrete planters, done in the style of Grecian urns, held long-dead roses.  Now the greyish, thorned stems grasped impotently at chip-wrappers and discarded crisp-bags, urban flowers in an abandoned square.  The courtyard was dark, the shadows of the buildings creating a perpetual twilight.  A window in the wall of one of the buildings opened, the old wooden frame protesting the need to move and shuddering in its tracks.  It stopped, only a few inches open, and there was muted swearing from behind it before strong hands seized it and jerked it upwards several times, eventually opening it to its full extent.  A man climbed through into the courtyard, followed by another and then another.

“What the hell is this?” said the third man.  He was wearing a neat grey suit that looked as though it had been bought off-the-peg at a high-street ‘tailor’.

“Where the hell is this?” said the second man, whose suit was substantially smarter and better fitted.  “I knew you lot were secretive, Damocles, but this is going to extremes, don’t you think?”

“A door would have been nice,” said the third man.  He looked down at his polished shoes, noting that they were now shaded here and there by sticky grey dust.  “And maybe a cleaner?  They’re not expensive, you know.”

“This is necessary,” said Damocles.  He was wearing his suit over a black polo neck and thought he looked like Steve Jobs.  His hair was brushed back from his forehead and had a single, thin white stripe running through it a little like a badger.  He was wearing round, John Lennon style glasses with plain glass for lenses and thin black leather gloves.  “Quite apart from the need for discretion,” he shot an accusing glance at the second man, “in many of our affairs, the fact that there is animal testing carried out here means that we have to be exceptionally alert with our security.  It really would not be good if animal protestors or ethics groups were to try and break in and release the animals.”

“Ah, the publicity,” said the third man.  He rubbed his shoes on the scrubby grass, hoping to dislodge some of the dust.

“No,” said Damocles.  “The inevitable deaths.  We are... aware of how to handle the media establishment, as you should know already. but the animals in here are both expensive to produce, even more so to replace, and a security breach of that magnitude would... attract the attention of JDR.”

He said nothing and gazed at the two men for a few seconds, letting that sink in.  JDR was Jeremy Diseased-Rat, the owner and CEO of Data Analytics Marketetic Normalisations and, for those people able to retain the firm and their expertise, a highly volatile megalomaniac with little regard for the niceties of human interaction and gentlemanly conduct.

“Well,” said the second man, “we certainly wouldn’t want that.”

“I don’t see this facility,” said the third man, earning him a glare from the second.  “Well, I don’t.  This is a rotten little courtyard in the middle of nowhere, on the other side of a condemned building that smells like it was used as a hotel for incontinent lepers for fifteen years.”

“Thirteen,” said Damocles.  “Though officially it wasn’t leprosy as that’s been eradicated in the United Kingdom.  I believe the official records state that it was viral melancholia with unusually severe side effects.”

“Like a leg dropping off?”

“That’s not quite how it works,” said Damocles.  “But why not?”

“Wait a minute,” the third man was looking nervous now and had forgotten about trying to clean his shoes.  “How long does leprosy hang around for.  I mean, we just came through that building.”

“I shouldn’t worry,” said Damocles. “It’s very curable these days.  Anyway, you are here to see the facility and the chippo, so let’s get on with it.” He turned away from them for a moment, concealing with his body his fingers touching buttons inset into his suit sleeve, and then turned back.  Both men looked slightly startled and glanced at one another.

“So... where do we go?” asked the second. 

“Turn around,” said Damocles, lifting an arm and pointing just beyond them.  His black gloves made him seem like a sinister scarecrow.

The two men turned and managed to avoid gasping or sounding shocked when they saw that a metal box roughly twice the size of an old public telephone box had appeared behind them.  The third man stared at the floor, hunting for signs of a gap between the box and the ground to prove that it had risen out of the ground, and grunted faintly with pleasure when he found it.

“Nice trick,” he said.  “This can’t be how you get the animals in though.”

“You don’t need to know,” said Damocles.  “This way, please, gentlemen.  And yes, it’s going to be a little bit of a squeeze.”

“The chippo,” said Damocles as the lift descended, “is what we’re calling the hippo-eating chupacabra.  We tried chupahippo but no-one liked that name.  Focus groups suggested that we needed something that sounded friendly and appealing, with a minority pointing out that no matter how cuddly we made it sound, this is fundamentally a beast that is capable of hunting and killing a hippopotamus.  Which is a tall order even for humans.  We settled on chippo as a portmanteau of the original name, hinting as to the origin of the beast, and because it reminded people in the focus groups of a wood-chipper.  Which, coincidentally, is a noun that came up a lot when people saw the aftermath of the chippo’s feeding.”

“What do you mean, exactly?” asked the third man.  The second man was turning pale and starting to sweat.

“The most common comment was it looked like someone had pushed the hippo through a wood-chipper,” said Damocles.  The chippo is an... astonishingly messy eater.”

Chupacabra

Jeronica’s natural smile was more of a snarl: lips slightly parted and slightly curled, exposing bright white teeth that distracted the viewer from the tightly focused stare that fell just below eye-contact and instead seemed fixed on their carotid artery.  At this particular moment the Under-Secretary-in-Exile for Columbia was the target of her gaze, and her smile, and he was feeling extremely nervous.  He was sat in an Eames chair in Jeronica’s office, next to the Secretary-in-Exile who was carefully and delicately laying out a set of statements that were deniably not requests for help.  The chair was, the Under-Secretary was sure, just slightly too low; or perhaps the desk between himself and Jeronica was just a tiny bit too high?  She didn’t seem to have a problem with it, but she also seemed to be eyeing him up like finger-food at a diplomatic buffet.  He swallowed, feeling his Adam’s apple bob.

“There are approximately 50 hippos,” said Verj.  He wasn’t Columbian though he claimed to be spiritually Columbian.  “I’ve often noted that hippopotamus skin is woefully underused in the fashion industry.  It seems that the Spring-Summer season might benefit from something a little more radical than, say, more floral prints or outsized hats.”

“The problem with hippos,” said Jeronica looking at Verj for long enough for the Under-Secretary to relax, “is twofold.  One is that they’re rather hard to hunt, and the other is that they’re not used in fashion because it would be like wearing tarpaulin.”

Verj gazed up at the paintings behind Jeronica’s desk, which impressed the Under-Secretary.  He’d tried looking at them to avoid having to look at Jeronica and found them to be profoundly disturbing in ways he couldn’t put words to.  At first glance they seemed to be unrelated, but as he’d looked at them for longer he’d started to find elements from one repeated in the others and found that unsettling.  The colour scheme wasn’t quite right; he couldn’t say exactly what the problem was, just that it made the back of his eyeballs itch.  Finally he’d decided he preferred Jeronica’s unblinking gaze to the picture’s invitation to subtle insanity. “Modern weaponry,” he said slowly, seemingly unrelated to the conversation.

“Does not leave much of the hippo remaining if you intend to take them out safely,” said Jeronica.  “Please don’t misunderstand me here, it is entirely possible to have couture fashioned from fabrics with obvious damage, and even to represent this as a reflection of the ills of modern warfare and the sickness of society that permits this, but the wholesale slaughter of 50 hippos to produce one outfit is... expensive.  It is hard to get people to look past ’50 hippos’ even with a suitably exclusive label sewn inside it.”

“Tarpaulin wouldn’t be a problem though?” asked the Under-Secretary, hoping to contribute.  Verj lifted his eyes to the ceiling, which was pleasantly white and smooth, like a ski-slope the day before the season starts and Jeronica returned her gaze to what was probably his throat.

“A few years ago we had Parisian models wearing actual binbags,” she said.  “I am confident that they could have been used binbags if we’d wanted.  Tarpaulin would not be a problem; we would...,” she paused, her eyes glittering as she thought, “... probably reference the Akkadian fishermen displaced when the British moved in Canada,” she said.  “That would be – stimulating – for the French fashion houses.  However, the problem of humanely hunting the hippo remains.”

“But this problem is soluable?” Verj’s words were so quiet and his gaze so far removed from the participants in the room that if he’d denied having said it the Under-Secretary would have struggled to contradict him.

“We solved the Sweden problem,” said Jeronica.  “So yes, the problem is soluable.”

“Good,” said Verj.  “Then I’m sure an accommodation can be reached.  Perhaps there might be something else where agreement is needed where suitable concessions might be found.”

“Yes,” said Jeronica.  She opened a beige-folder on her desk and the Under-Secretary craned his neck to see what was in it.  He was slightly surprised to see that it was empty.  Jeronica looked at it as though it weren’t though.

“You mentioned a chupacabra,” she said.

“Mentioned is such a strong word,” said Verj.  “I have heard tell of a chupacabra.

“Just the one?” Jeronica sounded disappointed.  “A breeding pair would be significantly more...”

“Valuable?”

“Interesting,” she qualified.

“Do you think it might be possible to breed a chupacabra that eats hippos?”

Jeronica closed the folder and for a moment there was a flicker of emotion across her face.  “Feeding habits are generally easy,” she said.  “Though I am a little concerned that this would only create a rabbit, as happened in Australia.  There are, after all, only 50 hippos.  What would the hippo-eating chupacabra turn to after the hippos are eaten?”

“There are giraffes,” said Verj.  “and a certain population of undesirable elements. But these are also finite in number.”

“Precisely,” said Jeronica.