Name: The Iron Man - Chapter 4 by Ted Hughes
Uploaded: 2025-10-31T04:25:17.000Z
Duration: 13 min 16 s
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First published Great Britain, 1968 by Faber & Faber Ltd.

Chapter 4 the space being and the Iron Man One day there came strange news.

Round eyes, busy mouths, frightened voices.

One of the stars in the night sky had begun to change.

This star had always been a very tiny star, of no importance at all.

It had shone up there for billions and trillions of years in the constellation of Orion, that great shape of the giant hunter that strides across space on autumn and winter nights.

In all its time, this tiny star had never changed in any way.

Astronomers peering through their telescopes noticed it first.

That tiny star was definitely getting bigger, and not just bigger, but bigger and bigger and bigger.

Each night it seemed it was bigger still.

It became bigger than the dog star, the large coloured, twinkly star at the heel of the hunter Orion.

Bigger than Jupiter, the great blazing planet.

Night after night, as it grew and grew and grew and grew.

They stared up at it with frightened faces till at last it hung there in the sky over the world, blazing down the size of the moon, a deep, gloomy red.

And now there could be only one explanation.

The star was getting bigger because it was getting nearer.

It was getting nearer and nearer and nearer.

It was rushing towards the world faster than a bullet, faster than any rocket, faster even than a meteorite.

And if it hit the world at that speed, why, the whole world would simply be blasted to bits in the twinkling of an eye.

It would be like an express train hitting a bowl of goldfish.

No wonder the people stared up with frightened faces.

No wonder the astronomers watched it through their telescopes with worried frowns.

But all of a sudden, another strange thing.

There it hung, a deep and gloomy red, just the size of the Moon.

It got no smaller, but it did not get any bigger.

Now everybody tried to explain why and how this was, what had happened, what was happening, what was going to happen.

And now it was that the next strange thing occurred.

First, in the middle of the giant star, a tiny black speck had appeared.

On the second night, this speck was seen to be wriggling and it was much bigger.

And on the third night, you could see it without a telescope, a struggling black speck in the centre of that giant, red, gloomy star.

On the fifth night, the astronomers saw that it seemed to be either a bat or a black angel or a flying lizard.

A dreadful silhouette flying out of the center of that giant star straight towards the Earth.

Each night, when the astronomers returned to their telescopes to peer up, this black flying horror was bigger, with slow, gigantic wing beats, with long, slow writhings of its body in.

It was coming down through space, outlined black against its red star.

Within a few more nights, its shape had completely blotted out the red star.

Behind it, the nameless, immense bat angel was flying down at the earth like a great black swan.

It was definitely coming straight at the Earth.

It took several more days to cover that distance.

And then, for one awful night, its wings seemed to be filling most of the sky.

The moon peered fearfully from low on the skyline, and

all the people of Earth stayed up, gazing in fear at the huge black movement of wings that filled the night.

The shock of its landing rolled around the Earth like an earthquake, spilling teacups in London, jolting pictures off walls in California, cracking statues off their pedestals in Russia.

it was a terrific dragon, terribly black, terribly scaly, terribly knobbly, terribly horned, terribly hairy, terribly clawed, terribly fanged, with vast, indescribably terrible eyes in each one as big as Switzerland.

There it sat, covering the whole of Australia, its tail trailing away over Tasmania and into the sea, its foreclosures on the headlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Luckily, the mountains and hills propped its belly up, clear of the valleys, and

the Australians could still move about in the pitch darkness under this new sky, this low, strange covering of scales.

They crowded towards the light that came in along its sides.

Of course, whoever had been on a mountaintop when the dragon landed had been squashed flat.

And there this horror sat, glaring out over the countries of the world.

What was going to happen to the world now?

Aircraft flew near this Space Bat angel dragon taking photographs.

It lay over Australia, higher than any mountains, higher than the Hindu Kush in Asia, and

For a whole day, while the people of the Earth trembled and wept and prayed to God to save them, the space Bat angel dragon lay resting, its chin sunk in the Indian Ocean, the sea coming not quite up to the bottom of its lip.

But the next morning, its giant voice came rumbling around the world.

The Space Bat angel dragon was speaking it wanted to be fed.

And what it wanted to eat was living things.

It didn't care what so long as the food was alive.

Otherwise it would roll out its tongue longer than the Trans Siberian Railway and lick huge swathes of life off of the surface of the earth.

Cities, forests, farmlands, whatever there was.

It would leave the world looking like a charred pebble unless it was fed and fed quickly.

Its voice shook and rumbled around the earth for a whole hour as it delivered its message.

When finally it ended and it lay waiting, the peoples of the world got together.

If they fed it, how could they ever satisfy?

And every new day it would be as hungry as ever.

How can you feed a beast the size of Australia?

All the countries of Europe will easily fit inside Australia.

The monster's stomach alone must be the size of Germany.

They would not feed this space bat angel dragon, or whatever it was.

They would declare war on it and all get together to blast it off the face of the earth.

And so it was that all the peoples of the Earth declared war on the monster and set out their armed forces in a grand combined operation.

Missiles and bombs, shells, flamethrowers.

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The Iron Man - Chapter 4 by Ted Hughes

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