Published 'Stuff' 1994

The thing in the wardrobe was wearing garments that had previously hung there by the merest volition of skewed metal and curved hooks and skeletal shoulder-blades and twisted joints...

The coat-hanger creature had indeed gathered substance for itself by the creative force of its abruptly aware mind. A brain is more powerful in its earliest stages, of course, but only if the body that contains it has the wherewithal to accomplish the mind's commands. Human babies are too weak, too small, too fragile and shrivelled, too damn helpless and hopeless, to take advantage of the sudden mental shaft of lightning within its soft-capped skull...

The coat-hanger monster was mammoth mind in motion, its metal arms donning winter clothes whole­sale. The unravelling tourniquets of steel probed the sleeves and leg-holes, giving birth to a jerking marionette of mounds and bundles.

The wardrobe—ill-constructed as it was by human buffoons from ridicu­lously measured components which would have been more useful as firewood than a blueprint for furni­ture—shifted on its feeble foundations with a lumber-smitten roar of split and splayed plywood planks.

There was nobody in the room to witness such creativity at work—but the bed did cringe beneath its covers, only thankful that it was a mindless mass of cloth, twill, canvas and soggy springs. Its plump plump pillows, however, surreptitiously nurtured steel porcupine foetuses within feath­ery down...

Upon the air, there burst a baby's mindless screeching to high heaven from a distant part of the house. No doubt it wanted the night nurse to change its soggy nappy or to respring the big diaper-pin.