Let Sleeping Sea-Monsters Lie Read Online Free PDF Page A

the swamp by terrifying them with his vile red eyes. She wanted him to bubble disgustingly in the mud at the
bottom of the pond and she wanted him to speak.
    “Say ‘Mummy’,” she would yell at him. “Go on, say it. Say ‘Mummy’.”
    But the Brollachan couldn’t say “Mummy”. He couldn’t say anything. His mouth was big but he used it for eating, not for talking. So he would roll away sadly and suck in a
large turnip or a dead rat or a ham-bone and you would see them – the turnip or the rat or the ham-bone – lying inside him sort of glowing a little until they gradually became part of
the Brollachan because that is what happens to the things that Brollachans eat.

    All day long the Brollachan’s mother followed him about, flapping a wet cloth at the furniture and dripping water on him.
    “I don’t know what will become of you, Brollachan. Why aren’t you outside drowning someone? Why are you sitting in that bucket? Why don’t you do something with your life?
And why don’t you say ‘Mummy’?”
    The Brollachan tried hard to please her. But however wide he opened his mouth, all that came out was a kind of gulp or a sort of glucking noise.
    Sometimes the Brollachan’s mother invited her friends round; ladies like Black Annis who was a cannibal witch with a blue face or the Hag of the Dribble who was covered all over in grey
slime, and then she would start.

    “You don’t know how I worry about him,” she would say to these ladies, prodding the Brollachan with her webbed foot as he lay politely on the floor. “I can’t sleep
for worrying about him. He’s so backward; he doesn’t even try to frighten people into fits. And he won’t say ‘Mummy’!”
    “You should punish him,” said the cannibal witch, burping rudely because she always swallowed people whole and this gave her wind. “Make him kneel on dried peas – nothing
more painful than that!”
    Which was not only a cruel but a silly thing to say since the Brollachan did not have any knees.
    One day the Brollachan and his mother went for a walk in the forest. The Brollachan liked the forest very much. It was not wet like the swamp where he lived and the leaves felt pleasantly tickly
under his body. He stretched himself out more and more and became bush-shaped, then tree-shaped, and then just Brollachan-shaped but extra large. He felt happy and he felt free.

    But the Brollachan’s mother was still talking. “Why don’t you learn the names of the trees, Brollachan?” she said. “Why don’t you at least try to give off an
evil mist? There’s a Brollachan in the next valley who has a whole village gibbering with fright every time he shows himself. And he can say ‘Mummy’!”
    After a while the Brollachan rolled away between the trees and he rolled and he rolled and he rolled until he was quite a way from his mother.
    The Brollachan’s mother did not notice this at first because she was so busy talking. “It’s all right for you,” she said. “You can’t have a stomach ache from
worrying because you haven’t got a stomach. You can’t have a headache from worrying because you haven’t got a head. You can’t – Brollachan, where are you? Brollachan,
come here at once, I’m talking to you. How dare you hide from your mother! I can see your vile red eyes behind that tree. I know you’re just pretending to be that smelly toadstool. Now
come to your mummy, Brollachan; come at once!”
    But the Brollachan was a long, long way away and he was well and truly lost. He rolled on, however, until he came to a little wooden house in a clearing and because he was very tired by now, he
oozed through the crack under the door and went inside.

    It was a very nice house. There was a fire in the grate and a painted stool and a rocking chair in one corner. In the rocking chair, fast asleep, sat an old man with a kind face and a long white
beard. Everything was quiet and everything was dry and the Brollachan liked it very