Shrinking Ralph Perfect

by Chris D'Lacey

  The second copper, PC Robbins, moved forward. ‘Put the box down, Bilt, and let the boy go. Game’s up. You ain’t got nowhere to run.’

  ‘Roll up,’ said Jack, and wiggled the peg hard.

  The coat hanger twanged and a crackle of green light leapt across its points.

  The scientist’s meter whined off the scale. ‘Stand back!’ he shouted.

  Wise advice. Half a second later, Jack and his hostage had completely disappeared.

  Into the Wasteland

  That was how it seemed to the blinking eye, at least. Both of them had been miniaturised, of course, and pitched close to the wall of the Miniville aquarium. Ralph could smell the drying marmalade. He could see the shattered house through the cataract of glass, but no sign whatsoever of its occupants. He felt sick and dizzy and anxious for his mum, and his neck was begging for a long, cold compress. But there wasn’t time for healing or even time to heave. Jack was on his feet and tugging at him hard.

  ‘C’mon, you toe-rag.’

  ‘I hate you,’ said Ralph.

  And he kicked and he punched and they wrestled again. But this time, the bout was weak and short-lived. The cuff on Ralph’s wrist had been set for a man’s arm not a boy’s, and as they jostled and tussled and the join became strained, Ralph’s hand popped out and he staggered back and fell against the tacky marmalade, gummed to it by the arms and shoulders. Jack, Jack, the lucky black cat, had come away with the device. Typical, Ralph thought. He always got the duff end of the Christmas cracker.

  ‘Most grateful,’ said the builder, flexing his wrist to bring the feeling back. He kicked a fragment of an egg cup aside. From his pocket he produced a miniature penknife. ‘Know what you are? A blooming nuisance. Want to see my knife-throwing act?’

  Ralph shook his head. ‘Behind you,’ he said.

  ‘Ho ho. Three bags full,’ Jack sneered.

  ‘Knocker! Git down! Now!’ Ralph shouted.

  Jack jumped like a firework, then. He turned to see a hot tongue idling towards him. It was dribbling with saliva and it smelt of rotting meat. Knocker rolled a lip and showed his teeth. If only… If only he’d slurped straight away and not paused to growl it would have been a ghastly, but fitting, end. Jack, licked up by his own ‘best friend’, a living Jonah in the whale that was his dog. But that momentary lapse gave the builder time to scarper. He hastened away between Knocker’s paws, deep into the shadows beneath the dog’s pudgy tummy.

  Poor Knocker. If he’d had a good leg to scratch his brain with, he would have done. Instead, he grizzled in confusion and turned a half-circle, allowing Ralph the opportunity to slip out of his sweatshirt and take off after Jack, without fear of becoming a dog’s dinner himself. He hurried under Knocker and out the other side.

  By now, the floor was springing with the transits of giants, every footfall registering a small explosion. Annie, Ralph noticed, was making for the fish tank. He prayed she’d be in time to save his mum and the others. The three men, meanwhile, were on their knees, picking up pieces of damaged crockery, searching for signs of mini-humans. But in the ghost-ravaged wasteland of broken pottery, it was far too easy for Jack to hide. They would never find him or the device. He could disappear for days behind a skirting board, then restore himself to full size and walk away, untouched.

  But it didn’t happen like that. Suddenly, Jack scrambled out from under a dessert spoon and came running back towards Ralph, faster than a ferret. His arms and legs were a blur of locomotion and his eyeballs were so far out of their sockets they resembled two light bulbs (of very low wattage). When Ralph saw what Jack was running from, he knew he would need the speed of a racehorse to stand any chance of getting away.

  Ants move surprisingly fast. So quickly did they swarm to surround the two humans that even Ralph was terrified. He backed against Jack and they circled together, trapped and outnumbered by a ring of soldier ants.

  Ralph knew they would need a miracle to escape. They had no weapons – and what good would they be against armoured exoskeletons and acid sprays, anyway? Jack, Jack, the incompetent prat had dropped the transgenerator in his dash – so there wasn’t even hope of turning themselves into a couple of pin-pricks and floating away next time Knocker sneezed.

  It was over.

  Goodnight.

  Roll up, do.

  The ant nearest Ralph dipped its cone-shaped head. Its scissor-like jaws opened sideways. Its compound eyes rolled over its prey. Ralph saw its feelers arc. He covered his face. Strangely, his young life didn’t flash before him. Instead – and what a blooming time for this – he remembered a fantastic film he’d seen in which a tiny company of British soldiers had fought to defend their post, Rorke’s Drift, against a monumental army of Zulu warriors. The soldiers were outnumbered twenty-five to one, but had fought so bravely that the warriors eventually ceased to attack and let the wounded survivors go free.

  But fighting bravely was not in Jack’s blood.

  ‘Take the boy!’ he squealed. ‘He’s young! He’s juicy!’

  The ants closed in. Jack gave a scream and was carried away, on the backs of a column of six linked workers.

  The nearest remaining ant paused before Ralph. Curling its antennae high into the air, it reached out and stroked the boy on the temples. The touch was electrifying. Ralph sensed another kind of world. A world in which little creatures worked for one another and co-operated readily to live a better life. When he opened his eyes, the ants were gone. Who knows why they had spared his life? Who knows why they took Jack Bilt?

  A voice boomed overhead. Ralph looked up and saw a human finger coming towards him.

  ‘Here,’ the voice was saying. ‘Here.’

  A glass thudded down, enclosing Ralph inside it. Paper was carefully pushed under its rim. Ralph climbed on to it and lay down, exhausted.

  And there he was happy to stay for a while, hoisted to freedom by ground-to-air tumbler. They handed him to Annie while they carried on searching. She sat on the sofa with the glass on her lap, knuckling a tear from below one eye. Ralph stood up and made semaphore waves. Annie dibbled her fingers back. ‘Mum?’ he mouthed. ‘Did you find Mum?’

  Annie pressed her fingertips against her mouth. Her gaze drifted across the room. Ralph turned around to see what she was looking at, but PC Robbins was blocking his view. Suddenly, the copper rocked back on his heels, examining some object he’d picked up off the floor. He tilted it between his finger and thumb. Ralph knew straight away that it had to be the second bipolar transgenerator.

  ‘Be careful!’ he yelled, slapping his hands against the tumbler.

  But Robbins foolishly squeezed his fingers and a dot of red light winked out of the device.

  Oh no, thought Ralph, sensing that familiar wobbling of molecules.

  With a crash that set Knocker yapping for England, the tumbler exploded and pieces of glass flew in all directions.

  ‘Oh!’ squealed Annie, paddling her feet. Ralph was full-sized again, perched on her lap.

  The second copper hurried across. ‘Berringford, what’s happening?’

  The scientist ran a scanning device over Ralph’s brain. ‘Fascinating. Quite fascinating. He’s been returned to normal by a reverse transgenic stimulus. Someone must have used the device.’

  ‘I fink that was me,’ PC Robbins said. He pulled a bloodstained hand away from his neck. A piece of glass from the tumbler had lodged below his ear. Split between his thumb and forefinger, were the useless remains of a tiny coat-hanger and peg.

  Berringford sucked in through his teeth. ‘Well, that’s most unfortunate.’

  ‘What does that mean for the others?’ asked Annie.

  To which Ralph added, ‘Where’s my mum?’

  The scientist squinted at the crushed device. ‘That really is most regrettable. Oh well, too bad. PC Sparrow, take the boy away.’

  ‘I’m going nowhere without my mum,’ Ralph said.

  Berringford pushed his glasses to the bridge of his nose. ‘All of t
hem,’ he said, nodding at a tumbler on the mantelpiece. It was full of little people. Kyle. Neville. Jemima. Tom. Penny Perfect, in Tom’s arms. ‘They’ll all go together. The dog included. Quarantine. Three months. Keep on searching for Bilt, PC Robbins…’

  Epilogue

  So there you have it. Something horrible happened. Some things horrible happened. Ghastly things.

  Appalling.

  If you were Ralph, what would be the worst of the adventure, do you think? To be bullied and teased by Kyle Salter? To be miniaturised and cooped up in an arcade exhibit? To sleep on a scouring pad? To have to drink water tainted with dog slobber? To grow scrawny on a diet of hundreds and thousands? To do battle with dust mites and grubby buzzing flies and a mad-mad-mad-mad-bad professor?

  Or would it be what happened to Ralph next that would spook you?

  Imagine this: being taken to a secret laboratory, deep underground below a moor in Northumberland. You’re locked in a room where cameras watch your every move. Even when you’re sleeping. Even when…yes, that too. You have plenty to eat and are well looked after, but every day, for three months, scientists hook you up to strange machines that make your head buzz while they record any interesting changes in you, scratching out results on rolling charts, in looping graphs, in diverse colours. They put needles in your arms and draw your blood. They take snippets of your hair. They bottle your wee. They monitor your dreams, especially your nightmares.

  Is this what aliens do to us, you wonder?

  Once a day, for two short hours, you’re allowed to see your mother and the man she has fallen deeply in love with. They intend to marry, Tom Jenks and Penny Perfect. Lack of height is not a barrier to human feeling. From this you will have guessed that they are still tiny. All the miniones are, including the unfortunate Detective Inspector Bone (like Ralph, you might feel a little guilty about dragging him into Miniville). Berringford, who heads the scientific inquiry into the strange goings-on in Midfield Crescent, as yet has little hope to offer them. Every day he says to Ralph, ‘This is why we need you in the project, dear boy.’ The project. He always talks about ‘the project’. As if Tom and Penny and Ralph and Knocker are little more than mice being prodded with a stick. ‘We need to observe your metabolism—’ he says (He uses a lot of words ending in ‘ism’. None of them give very much away.) ‘—so we might determine the precise effects that transgeneration has on tissue health and, erm, brain power.’ And yet when he says this he always slips a tape measure round Ralph’s biceps and notes any increase in muscle size and tone.

  Now, why would he do that, do you think? You wouldn’t be interested in muscle tone, would you? You’d be saying to this scientist, ‘I want my mum back. My whole mum back. When are you going to make her big again?’

  And Berringford would tell you, ‘It’s not that easy,’ and do that irritating thing that gentlemen in white coats do with their spectacles: cough on the lenses then polish them on the end of their tie.

  Not easy? Phooey! ‘Delta theta!’ you’d be shouting. Surely the scientists must know that? It’s written on the wall in the tower room. ‘Talk to Professor Collonges,’ you’d urge them. ‘He’ll know what to do.’

  But your reply from Berringford would be suitably ambiguous. He would drum his fingers on his clipboard and say: ‘Yes, we’ve, erm, acquired his notes on particle displacement from his academic files at Oxford. We have also recovered the original transgenerator which Bone took from Jack Bilt’s wrist. It’s very small, of course, and the felgate crystal has lost its charge.’ (The felgate crystal; ah, that was the stone.) ‘Our specialists are attempting to…reconfigure it. We have also hired the services of an excellent archaeologist to, erm, piece together the vase that the boy Luke Baker was mixed up in. He was damaged, I’m afraid, during the disturbances. We’re still missing a small section of his left ear.’

  ‘What about…?’

  The professor? Hmm. Now, take a deep breath. Are you surprised when Berringford shakes his head? Collonges was squashed by a cushion full of dust mites. The only thing the scientists recovered was his brain. It lies in a deep freeze in Berringford’s laboratory. But no one’s going to tell Ralph that, are they?

  And what of good, kind neighbour, Annie Birdlees? The dear old lady of lavender and lace, described as gruesome at the front of our story (more on that in a moment). Did she go into quarantine? No, not Annie. She was allowed to visit Ralph daily and keep him up to date with what was happening in the Crescent.

  ‘They won’t allow me into my house,’ she complained. ‘Do you know, they put a wheel on that poor maimed dog and took him in, hoping that he’d sniff out Mr Bilt?’

  Ralph threw up his hands. ‘I told you,’ he said to a whirring camera, ‘the ants took Jack.’ They would have stunned him with their sprays of formic acid and…well, you can probably picture the rest. Ralph knew, as I’m sure you clever ones do, that ants cannot chew or swallow solid food. They squeeze out the juice from their prey and drink it, then throw the dry husk of the body away.

  Charming.

  ‘How’s Miriam?’ Ralph would whisper every day.

  Oh yes, Miriam, the feisty ghost. You’d certainly want to know what became of her.

  ‘Pining,’ Annie would whisper back. ‘She believes you’ve left her, like her intended. It’s her lot, Ralph: to pine away until eternity. She won’t be happy until you go back.’

  So here we are, back, one snowy morning in February. Three months to the day since the miniones were rescued. Annie’s house has been cleared of debris and cigarettes and dark blue sheets and seaside attractions (Ralph inquired of PC Robbins what had happened to The Frisker and was told it might be used at their local station). The fifty thousand pounds Jack gave for the house was, wouldn’t you know it, counterfeit. So the transaction has been annulled and the keys have been returned to their rightful owner. Number 9 Midfield Crescent is Annie’s again.

  Is she happy to be home? Yes, she is. A brief spell living with her sister in Totnes has taught the old cuckoo that a life of solitude can have its rewards. But she is not fully alone now, of course. Being a woman who has always had encounters with ‘the spirits’, she has welcomed Miriam into her home. Ralph, too, has moved in for a spell. While the scientists work to ‘reinstate’ his mother (and oh how he misses her, every hour of every day) he will live, for now, as a ward to Annie.

  So, here’s the cosy final scene. Annie makes them both a cup of hot chocolate and they sit in the lounge, with Miriam blowing cool air across Ralph’s drink and Annie stroking Knocker’s head. It was either the bullet or a dogs’ home for him until Annie stepped in and said she would have none of it. Blame not the mutt for the malice of its master. That was her line.

  Admirable.

  The room feels dreadfully large to Ralph. There is very little in it apart from the seats and the shoes Annie Birdlees was wearing at the time (she broke a heel when Ralph played the genie on her lap and took them off because she couldn’t walk in them).

  The room, yes. It really is a desert. Even the remains of Annie’s ferns were taken to the lab so the soil could be filtered through a fine, dry sieve, just in case Jack had wriggled in among the roots and burrowed out a hide deep down in the earth.

  Jack, Jack, still unaccounted for. For this reason, the ‘authorities’, the men in white shirts and plain black suits who hover in the shadows around the scientists have never been able to ‘close the book’. They want the builder in their clutches. They want him pinned to a board like a moth. They want evidence of his ‘whereabouts’. And nothing, it seems, is beyond their ‘reach’. If Ralph and Annie were to strip away these floorboards or look into the garden a metre beyond the window, they would notice signs of ‘excavations’. The colony of ants was quickly captured. Forty thousand were taken back to the lab. All were examined (and eventually released). Neither Jack nor his husk was found among them.

  So what did become of the builder, Bilt? This is on Ralph’s mind as Knocker starts to sniff around Annie
’s shoes and Annie twitters on about her dolls’ house in the attic which she thinks could be converted to a number of flats to comfortably hold a dozen or so mini-people. And Miriam says, ‘Rafe, what’s the matter with your poodle?’ (Though inaccurate, she prefers this description to ‘terrier’.) And Knocker growls and backs away from an upturned shoe. Is it the pong that’s got to him? Or is he wanting to play a game of fetch? Ralph slides to his knees and takes a look.

  And oh, lordy-dordy, pump up your heart. There on the sole of Annie’s left shoe is a small, squashed figure. It is not an ant. Ants know to run when the shadow of a human foot falls over them. Look closely. No, no, closer than that. You can just see the pin-striped suit, perhaps?

  Annie. It was Annie who done for Jack.

  Dear sweet…innocent…Annie.

  Told you she was gruesome, didn’t I?

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